
Class JB L5 3 

Book l_a_ 

Copyiight N° 



COPmiGHT DEPOSIT. 



l^eligion and the 
J\V)*> Psychology 



For the Spirit searchetb all things, yea, the deep things. 

— I Cor. 2:10 



'Religion and the 
V^e^p 'Psychology 

*A Psycho-analytic Study of %digion 

BY 

WALTER SAMUEL SWISHER, B.D. 




BOSTON 

MARSHALL JONES COMPANY 

MDCCCCXX 



T> L 5 3" 



COPYRIGHT- 19 20-BY 
MARSHALL JONES COMPANY 



CI.A571777 



<:4 1^0 



THK PLIMPTON PRESS ■ NORWOOD • MASS • U • S • A 






To 

MARION NEWELL SWISHER 



21 

41 
74 

87 
ioo 

ii5 



CONTENTS * 

CHAPTER PAGE 

Foreword ix 

I. The Nature of the Religious Problem 
II. The Nature of the Unconscious and 
its Influence on the Religious Life 

III. The Motivation of Human Life . . 

IV. Determinism and Free-will 
V. Mysticism and Neurotic States . , . 

VI. The Problem of Evil 

VII. Pathological Religious Types 
VIII. The Occult in Modern Religious 

Systems . ■ . .128 

LX. Conversion and Attendant Phenomena 145 
X. The Changing Basis and Objective of 

Religion 158 

XI. Methods of Mental and Religious 

Healing 168 

XII. The Religious Problem in Education . 191 

APPENDICES 
I. Dreams and Dream Mechanisms . . .233 

II. Birth Dreams 247 

Bibliography ......... 257 

Index 259 

vii 



FOREWORD 

THERE is an increasing body of literature 
which deals with the new psychology and 
the psycho-analytic principle. In the brief 
years which have elapsed since Freud made his 
discovery of the Unconscious as a determinant of 
individual psychic life and published his 
Traumdeutung {Interpretation of Dreams), 
this work has become a classic and has run 
through several editions, both in German and 
English. The reach of its final chapters is be- 
yond the realm of applied psychology into that 
of philosophy. Dr. Oskar Pfister of Zurich has 
written a book, The Psycho-analytic Method, 
which details the psycho-analytic method of 
treatment for nervous ills especially as an edu- 
cational measure, and reveals broad scholarship 
and much painstaking research. Dr. I. H. Cor- 
iat, who collaborated with Worcester and Mc- 
Comb in the book, Religion and Medicine, 
has brought out two small books, What is 
Psycho-analysis? and The Meaning of Dreams, 
brief but extremely lucid and readable accounts 
of psycho-analysis, its basic principles and its 
method, from the viewpoint of the practicing 
neurologist. 

ix 



FOREWORD 



None of the works on this subject, with the 
exception of Pfister's, and that but fugitively 
and briefly, deals with religious problems. This 
book aims to be a comprehensive treatment of 
the religious problem in its various phases, the 
varied phenomena of religion, and various nor- 
mal and abnormal religious types, together with 
certain suggestions for a new and different kind 
of education, from the viewpoint of the new 
psychology. Readers of William James' "Va- 
rieties of Religious Experience" will already be 
familiar with mysticism, the phenomena of re- 
ligious conversion, and kindred movements and 
phenomena of the religious life. These things 
are not new, but recent exploration of the Un- 
conscious as a determinant of behavior and a 
potent factor in every thought and act of daily 
life, has added considerably to our knowledge 
of the buried self, and thrown much new light 
upon the problem of the motivation of human 
life, even as the hand of the archeologist reveals 
the structures of a city long-buried beneath vol- 
canic ashes and lava. 

There can be no doubt that there is still much 
prejudice to be overcome against the Freudian 
psychology. At first glance, its whole structure 
seems fantastic, far-fetched, and scientifically 
unsound. Any system of thought which has to 
do with the interpretation of dreams, seems to 
smack of quackery, charlatanry, and the pseudo- 
sciences of the Middle Ages, e. g., astrology and 



FOREWORD XI 

alchemy. It can only be pointed out that the 
pragmatic test proves the Freudian psychology 
sound; psycho-analysis operates successfully in 
human life, and to its beneficent ministrations 
is due the mental health of an increasing num- 
ber of persons who all their lives long have 
sought to be free of nervous troubles and, find- 
ing no relief elsewhere, have found healing in 
the psycho-analytic method of treatment. Prej- 
udice against the Freudian psychology is natu- 
ral, for civilized man is averse to having the bio- 
logical origin of his emotions revealed in the harsh 
white light of modern rational thought. The 
very repressions due to the conflict of the primi- 
tive Unconscious with the demands of the moral 
code of to-day lead the individual to condemn 
the new psychology. The more intellectualized 
man is, the more likely he is to condemn. 
- That religion had a phallic origin and that our 
emotional life has a sex basis, are concepts 
highly offensive and even shocking to sensitive 
souls. To these it must be pointed out that the 
primitive in its very nature is animal and savage, 
that we are in nowise to blame for carrying 
along with us impedimenta that belong essen- 
tially to a savage state of existence, since these 
things inhere in the Unconscious and are not ac- 
cessible to waking consciousness through con- 
scious mental effort; that is, we are not aware of 
their existence any more than a man is aware 
that he has a vermiform appendix until, like an 



Xll FOREWORD 

inflamed appendix, they create some disturbance 
and throw us off our mental balance. Again, the 
fact that religion has a phallic origin need not 
confound us ; man himself, if we accept the theo- 
ries of Darwin or Lamarck, had a Simian origin. 
This does not mean that he has brought with 
him into civilized life all the traits of the anthro- 
poid ape. He may bear on his person relics of 
his remote past: a rudimentary tail, or a Darwin 
ear; the new-born child will cling with prehen- 
sile grasp to the outstretched broom-stick. 
But these things are merely of historical interest. 
So with the phallic origin of religion; the fact 
that religion had such an origin or that it re- 
tains a certain amount of phallic imagery 
in refined, sublimated, and symbolized form 
constitutes no impugnment of religion. If re- 
ligion had such an origin, so had art. Primi- 
tive life in all its phases reveals a phallic origin. 
But what of that? We need not blush to own 
it. It is a historical fact, no more, no less. The 
world progresses through an open-minded ac- 
ceptance of new theories once they are tried and 
proved. It may burn a Giordano Bruno, force 
a Galileo to recant, cast a Columbus into prison, 
exile a Copernicus in a provincial town, but 
truth cannot be killed nor even long remain 
hid. If a man but speak truth, the world will 
in time come to his way of thinking. 

Let the Freudian psychology stand or fall on 
its own merits. It has naught to fear. 



FOREWORD Xlll 

The temptation is strong, it is well-nigh ir- 
resistible, for one whose metier is dealing with 
religious problems and who has the homiletic 
habit somewhat firmly fixed, to enter into dis- 
cussion of the genuine content, divine and abso- 
lutely real, of the mystic experience; to state 
ex cathedra the validity of evidence for the con- 
tinuation of life after physical dissolution; to 
give moral counsel and exhort the reader to live 
life on a high ethical plane; in a word, to use 
all the well-known methods of the pulpit, which 
are hortatory rather than scientific. I believe 
that in the following pages I have successfully 
avoided these pitfalls. This book is not a collec- 
tion of sermons, it aims at being a strictly scien- 
tific examination of human motives and a pres- 
entation of the new psychology as it applies to 
the religious problem. There is a vast literature 
which deals with the divine content of mysticism, 
the relationship of the soul and its God in the 
conversion experience, the proof of continuance 
of life after death. There seems no need to add 
one volume more. 

And, after all, though the devout soul may 
shrink at the harsh frankness of certain chap- 
ters of the book, may question or condemn its 
conclusions, and consider that the fine bloom is 
rubbed from religious experience by a merciless 
analysis of its phenomena, — after all, must 
there not be some mechanism, some method of 
functioning, by which the soul apprehends the 



XIV FOREWORD 



existence of God and feels His Presence? Sup- 
pose we do dub this mechanism neurosis or hys- 
teria or even psychosis? The devout soul will 
be ready with an answer to all of this apparently 
merciless dissection of religious experience and 
the (apparent) materialism of the new psychol- 
ogy. This ready answer will be: Freudian psy- 
chology may explain the mechanism, it cannot 
explain the matter, the divine content of the re- 
ligious experience. 

The question, then, of the validity of the re- 
ligious experience as evidence of the immanence 
of the Divine and its operations in human life, 
must be left for each individual soul to answer 
for himself; in this work, we must put it aside, 
not as being unworthy of serious consideration, 
but as lying within another field of inquiry. 

No man ever writes the book he intends to 
write. He plans and designs. He builds a frame- 
work. He will speak thus and so, fitting all his 
utterances into the frame-work he has erected. 
But it does not work out as he intended. He 
intends one thing and writes another. Probably, 
in mid-career, the whole plan and structure of 
his book change. This eccentricity of the human 
intellect may puzzle some, but not the Freudian. 
He knows his complexes and his resistances. He 
knows why, when he arrives at a point in his 
writing at which he had intended to say a certain 
thing, he forgets it and goes on to say something 
other than what was in his mind. He knows that 



FOREWORD XV 

there is a motive in his forgetting and that the 
substance of what he does say is not determined 
by caprice, but by an inexorable law which de- 
crees that certain thoughts shall rise into con- 
sciousness; that certain others shall be repressed 
into the Unconscious. He knows likewise that 
every book is autobiographical and that the 
trained observer can read between the lines and 
search out the innermost recesses of the author's 
personality. But this does not give him pause. 
He goes calmly to his self-appointed task and is 
not unduly depressed by anxiety for the gracious 
reception of his book nor concern for not having 
said the things he fully intended to say. They 
are perhaps better left unsaid. In due time, 
when the resistances are broken down which sup- 
pressed the forgotten material, it will emerge, 
and then the author will be inspired to write 
again. Meanwhile, the world will at least have 
been spared another book and when the author's 
forgotten thoughts do appear in print, they will 
have been well incubated. 

I am deeply grateful to Dr. I. H. Coriat, who 
has kindly reviewed the manuscript of this book 
and corrected the psycho-analytic portions. He 
has likewise given many helpful suggestions of 
which I have been glad to take advantage. 
Thanks are due to my wife, who has given many 
helpful suggestions as to the book's style. 



RELIGION AND THE 
NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

I. THE NATURE OF THE RELIGIOUS 
PROBLEM 

RELIGIOUS problems are manifold. Every 
religious system, every individual life, 
every age, and every people, has had its own 
particular religious problems. Certain of these 
are cosmic in character, certain are personal and 
individual. What or who created the universe? 
What was the process? What orders the uni- 
verse, sustains it and preserves it in its multi- 
farious activities? Does a God exist? If so, 
what is His nature? Here are cosmic problems 
for religion to solve. If a God exists, what is 
the relationship of His life to mine? How do 
His existence and His nature affect my life, de- 
termine my conduct? What is the interaction 
of Divine and human? Is the soul a direct 
emanation from Him? Is there soul substance, 
or is the personality but tabula rasa, a blank 
page, when the individual enters upon this 
earthly life? Why, in a divinely ordered uni- 
verse, does evil exist? These are personal, in- 
dividual problems. 



2 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

In spite of the apparent heterogeneity of re- 
ligious problems, they may, in the last analysis, 
all be resolved into one. Running between all 
these apparently diversified inquiries of the hu- 
man mind there is one causal thread. Whether 
the speculative mind is searching the farthest 
stars in order to come upon some satisfying 
theory of cosmic order, or casting inquiring eyes 
upon the diverse and apparently petty activities 
of human life, individual and collective, the prob- 
lem is in the main the same. It is the problem of 
philosophy and psychology as well as of religion: 
the problem of the adjustment of the ego to its 
environment. The religious problem is specifi- 
cally a problem of relationship. The individual, 
thrown willy-nilly into a given environment, is 
unhappy until he ascertains his own relations to 
that environment; if there is maladjustment, he 
would establish definite, effective relations with 
his environment. The solution of the religious 
problem is the perfect adjustment of the ego to 
its environment, the immediate environment and 
the cosmos. 

Does a man seek to scale the highest heavens? 
The object of his ambition is some satisfaction 
for his personal life. Does he sound the depths 
of the sea? Again, it is some personal satisfac- 
tion that he seeks. Would he prove the exist- 
ence of a God? It is for the sake of his own 
life. If he seek the cause of evil, cosmic or hu- 
man, it is because evil has impinged upon his 



NATURE OF THE RELIGIOUS PROBLEM 3 

own consciousness, it has fastened its fangs 
upon him, and looking to "whatever gods there 
be," he raises anguished eyes and mutely ques- 
tions, Why? 

Man would know the relationship between 
his own and the cosmic life. If he fail to 
find that such relationship exists, he feels that 
somehow he is out of tune, he will in every case 
endeavor to establish such relationship, strive 
to resolve discord in harmony. This is the be- 
ginning and the end of all religion. 

1. The Problem in Primitive Religion 

The man of advanced culture can scarcely 
conceive of religion divorced from ethics ; never- 
theless it is a fact that the most primitive of re- 
ligions are void of ethical content. The prim- 
ordial is synonymous with the emotional; thus 
the religion of the primitive is primarily emo- 
tional, the volitional and the intellectual ele- 
ments — upon which the ethical so largely de- 
pends — seem to be entirely wanting. While 
it is highly emotional, colored deeply with the 
uncontrolled passions of the savage, primitive 
religion has no ethical content because it man- 
ifests no sense of internal, moral conflict. Be- 
fore there can be a sense of sin, other and higher 
forces must enter into human life than those of 
which the primitive mind is aware. 

From observation of the modern savage and 



4 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

exploration into the Unconscious, we reach the 
conclusion that the primitive life is never the 
rationalized life. The primitive is conscious 
only of blind desire: sex-desire, desire to kill 
and eat, desire to fight and murder, to protect 
personal property including wife and child. All 
of these are but some form of sex-desire. 

But primordial man likewise suffers fear. He 
sees his fellow go down in battle, with the red 
blood streaming from his wounds. He sees him 
lying cold and stark who erst was pulsing with 
life and energy. He views the thundering cata- 
ract, the sharp lightning-stroke, the overwhelm- 
ing waves of the sea that may swallow his frail 
boat in an instant of time. He recognizes that 
there are forces in nature stronger than his own 
puny arm, mysterious forces that may deal out 
death and destruction. And he fears. He spec- 
ulates as to the nature of these mysterious de- 
structive forces and creates a cosmology animis- 
tic and anthropomorphic. He peoples woods 
and hills, mountains and valleys, sea, and land, 
and sky, with spirits, demons who wear human 
form. These may be malignant or beneficent 
as the whim seizes them. Man feels impelled to 
propitiate these ruthless intelligences of which 
his world is full. Hence arise the elaborate 
systems of primitive religion with their fetish- 
ism, taboo, propitiatory sacrifices, ceremonials, 
f eastings and ablutions. There is little or no 
evidence in all this of a sense of sin, an inward 



NATURE OF THE RELIGIOUS PROBLEM 5 

conflict. No altruistic note is sounded; there is 
no sense of obligation to a fellow man. In these 
primitive systems there is revealed the con- 
sciousness of but one desire: the desire of man 
so to adjust himself to his environment as to live 
in safety and security from the supernatural foes 
that surround him. His religion is therefore 
highly unethical. 

He has indeed a sad time in this attempt at 
adjustment. His gods are arbitrary to the last 
degree. They may preserve or slay as they see 
fit. They may accept or reject his offering ac- 
cording to their mood. Jahveh accepts the sac- 
rifice of Abel but rejects that of Cain for no os- 
tensible reason save that he is an arbitrary and 
jealous god. If the god is propitiated and is in 
a kindly mood, he will assist his worshipper in 
all his enterprises. He will enable him to slay 
his enemy at a distance by bringing a pestilence 
upon him. He will strike fear into the heart of 
the enemy, so that he will run when no man 
pursues. This god will protect and cherish his 
own, but to the enemy he is an avenging fire. 
But woe to the man or group that offends this 
god. It were better for such a man that he had 
never been born. The Children of Israel, a 
complaining and petulant people from all ac- 
counts, tire of their monotonous diet of manna. 
They ask for quail; their desire is gratified, but 
they have outraged an arbitrary and jealous god, 
and they eat but to die. And so it happens, that 



6 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

a people will endeavor to escape the penalty of 
their voluntary or inadvertent violation of the 
canons of such a god. They will therefore de- 
vise some means of turning his wrath away from 
themselves to another creature. Hence the insti- 
tution of human sacrifice in primitive religion. 
They will give the god their most precious pos- 
session: the first-born son, or a beautiful daugh- 
ter, and his wrath will be appeased. As time 
goes on, and they reach a higher state of culture, 
this sacrifice will no longer be tolerable, and an 
animal will be substituted. Thus the Jewish 
priest lays the sins of the people upon the scape- 
goat and the animal is thrust out into the 
wilderness, bearing, with equanimity we trust, 
the people's load of sin. I said, "sin," but it is 
noteworthy that in none of these cases is the sin 
of an ethical nature. The people have inadvert- 
ently and fortuitously outraged a jealous god. 
They were conscious of no intentional wrong; 
they were even ignorant of the cause of their 
offence ; nevertheless they suffer as grievously as 
though they had wantonly disobeyed the divine 
law. Even in the Garden of Eden, man com- 
mitted no ethical wrong. He ate of the tree and 
was punished, not because he had disobeyed, but 
because Jahveh was jealous of his own powers 
and as he declared to his peers, "Behold, the 
man is become as one of us, to know good and 
evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand, and 
take also of the tree of life, and eat and live 



NATURE OF THE RELIGIOUS PROBLEM 7 

forever, therefore Jahveh God sent him forth 
from the Garden of Eden, to till the ground 
from whence he was taken." That is, Jahveh, 
jealous of his own prerogatives, which man would 
share, removes man from harm's way by driv- 
ing him from the garden and giving him useful 
employment. It is likewise noteworthy that the 
serpent is the only one of the supernatural 
dramatis personae who speaks the truth. His 
prediction is verified: the man and woman have 
eaten of the tree, they do not die as Jahveh has 
threatened, but they do gain a knowledge of 
good and evil and bid fair, unless thwarted, to 
become even as Jahveh. There is not, then, in 
this entire myth an ethical note from beginning 
to end. 

The myth is a primitive sex-myth. The 
apple given by Eve to Adam (in some primitive 
cosmologies this takes the form of a flower) is 
the symbol of her virginity. The mutual eating 
symbolizes the conjugal relation. 1 In the Aztec 
form of this myth, she presents him a rose, that 
is, the flower of her virginity, which they smell 
together. In dreams and myths, eating or smell- 
ing can, by displacement, refer to the sexual act. 
The gross literalness is thus idealized and ren- 
dered less offensive. 

1 Freud (Interpretation of Dreams, page 247) : "Since bed and 
board constitute marriage, the former are often put for the lat- 
ter in the dream, and as far as practicable the sexual presenta- 
tion complex is transposed to the eating complex." 



8 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

Of especial significance is the serpent in this 
myth. It is nothing more or less than the phal- 
lus. Pfister says: "The phallic significance of 
the serpent runs through wide stretches of re- 
ligious history. Dieterich relates that in Greece 
on certain feasts, a phallus or a serpent was 
placed in a chest. The serpent cult of the ne- 
groes of Haiti and Louisiana bears a phallic 
character. . . . The mother of Augustus 
dreamed that she was impregnated by Apollo 
changed into the form of a serpent and has 
borne since the figure of a serpent on her thigh." 
{Psycho-analytic Method, pp. 286-287.) 

Desire, in the form of a serpent or phallus, 
disturbs the paradisiacal serenity of the Garden 
of Eden. 1 The conjugal act reveals to the primal 
pair knowledge of "good and evil," that is to 
say, it awakens sex-consciousness. Eve is de- 
flowered (note the obvious symbolism of the 
Aztec form of the myth) through the instrumen- 
tality of the phallus. Dreams, of nervous pa- 
tients are likely to be full of various sorts of 

1 Freud {loc. cit., p. 200 f.) points out the common occur- 
rence of non-embarrassment dreams of nakedness. These he 
interprets as the fulfilment of a wish to return to a childhood 
state, they represent a regression. He remarks that children often 
show exhibitional cravings, that they are elated at run- 
ning about naked, rather than ashamed. He says: "This age 
of childhood in which the sense of shame is lacking seems to our 
later recollections a Paradise, and Paradise itself is nothing but 
a composite phantasy from the childhood of the individual. It 
is for this reason, too, that in Paradise human beings are naked 
and are not ashamed until the moment arrives when the sense 



NATURE OF THE RELIGIOUS PROBLEM 9 

snakes, which are symbols of the thwarted love- 
life of the patient. The repressed sex-instinct 
of the individual comes to expression in this 
symbolized form. Of this I shall speak further 
in a later section of this book. 

The common sex-origin of these primitive 
myths explains their great similarity among 
widely scattered peoples. Researchers vex them- 
selves in vain when they strive to trace the trans- 
mission of such myths from one nation to 
another by some historical process: migration 
of nomadic peoples, the wanderings of the chron- 
icler from one nation to another, commercial 
transactions between widely disseminated peo- 
ples, and the like. The religion of Judaism 
shows traces of Assyrian, Babylonian, and Egyp- 
tian influences to be sure, but we need not vex 
ourselves in the attempt to find a common his- 
torical source for similar primitive myths and 
cosmologies. They all arise from the individual 
sex-life of primitive man (a view which I shall 
elaborate later), and thus come into being 
among remotely severed peoples quite indepen- 
dently of historical transmission. The primitive 
family group furnishes all the materials needed 

of shame and fear are (sic) aroused; expulsion follows, and sex- 
ual life and cultural development begin. Into this Paradise the 
dream can take us back every night." (Pp. 206-207.) Note 
how closely the Hebrew myth follows this program: the naked- 
ness without shame, the arousing of shame through the conjugal 
act, the ineffectual attempt to prevent the all-seeing eye of Jah= 
veh from discovering the nakedness. 



10 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

for the formulation of the most elaborate of 
these myths. And, as has been noted, these 
myths have not much ethical import. 

It is evident from examples which might be 
multiplied without end, that primitive religion 
originates in sex; it is a religion of externals: of 
correct observance of taboo, of propitiatory sac- 
rifice, and its objective is personal. So far from 
being ethical or altruistic to any degree, its end 
is self-satisfaction of the grosser sort and secur- 
ity from evil supernatural forces. 

2. The Problem in an Advanced State 
of Culture 

With the growth of a higher culture, a people 
develops an ethical sense and with this sense a 
definite conviction of sin. TJiis time-worn 
phrase, "conviction of sin," signifies nothing 
more nor less than a sense of inner conflict. The 
basis of this conflict will be seen in this and suc- 
ceeding chapters. It is unlikely that primitive 
man ever feels himself a stranger in a strange 
world. He may be more or less out of tune with 
his environment, but he has no sense of "other- 
worldliness" ; he never feels that "heaven is his 
home." For him, the life to come is a world of 
shadows; the real world is here. With such in- 
tellectual effort as his limited powers are capa- 
ble of, he may question the universe as to its 
how and why, but only in relation to his own 



NATURE OF THE RELIGIOUS PROBLEM II 

material wants and their satisfaction. His ad- 
justment to his environment is purely objective, 
as we have seen. But with the growth of a finer 
culture and a refinement of his wants, man be- 
comes conscious of inner conflict. 

The group life evolves to a higher plane, be- 
comes more compact, makes increasing demands 
upon the individual, and from the mass of 
taboos, superstitions, myths, which constituted 
primitive religion, a moral code slowly evolves 
and brings pressure to bear upon him. His in- 
dividual demands conflict with the demands of 
the group life, a pressure effected by contiguity. 
Meanwhile, man retains all of his primitive in- 
stincts, but with this difference: whereas in the 
savage state, instinct exists only to be satisfied, 
in the more highly organized group life, for va- 
rious social reasons, these instincts must be re- 
pressed. Immediately a conflict ensues between 
the demands of the individual and the code of 
the group. Sex desire, the fighting instinct, are 
not destroyed by this repression, they are sub- 
merged in the Unconscious. At length they are 
severed from conscious life and in the Uncon- 
scious lead an autonomous life, whence they 
emerge from time to time as emotional disturb- 
ances. 

Cut off from a man's thinking life, the primi- 
tive constantly seeks expression and finds it not 
through ideation but through emotion. The 
more sharply repressed the primitive is, the 



12 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

stronger the force with which it strives to emerge 
from its subterranean prison. Hence arise the 
various nervous ills of modern life, the psycho- 
neuroses, hence the self-reproach and the "con- 
viction of sin." The very instincts upon which 
his existence depends: sex-instinct that results 
in promiscuity, the predatory instinct that leads 
him to rob and kill his neighbor, the fear that 
warns him of an enemy's approach to his arbo- 
real retreat — these are inimical to the success- 
ful development of the group- life. The stronger 
the pressure of the group-spirit, the more severe 
the conflict. A man, as Freud says, is thus fre- 
quently forced to "live beyond his means," mor- 
ally speaking; certain primitive instincts strive 
within him for expression, but such expression 
is contrary to the moral law of the society in 
which he lives; this gives him a feeling of di- 
vided personality, of inner stress and strain 
{Sturm und Drang), he feels out of tune with 
his environment and so suffers keen mental an- 
guish — this is the conviction or sense of sin. 

Freud has a different but interesting explana- 
tion of the evolution of the sense of sin. He at- 
tributes it to a survival of primitive "blood 
guilt." {Totem and Taboo, Chapter IV, and 
Reflections on War and Death, page 50 f.) "If 
the Son of God had to sacrifice his life to ab- 
solve mankind from original sin, then, according 
to the law of retaliation, the return of like for 
like, this sin must have been an act of killing, a 



NATURE OF THE RELIGIOUS PROBLEM 13 

murder. Nothing else could call for a life in 
expiation. And if original sin was a sin against 
God the Father, the oldest sin of mankind must 
have been patricide — the killing of the primal 
father of the primitive human horde, whose 
memory picture later was' transfigured into a 
deity." 

This is interesting and ingenious, but there are 
several objections which may be raised. In the 
first place, although the lex talionis did demand 
an "eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth," in 
primitive society, the death penalty was fre- 
quently inflicted for crimes other than murder. 
In the earliest form of the Jewish Torah, we find 
that it is called for as a penalty for theft and 
adultery as well as for murder. In a nomadic 
state of existence, which is the earliest group- 
life, there were no provisions for imprisonment; 
instead of incarceration, therefore, the criminal 
was killed as the most convenient method of 
getting rid of him. 

Again, it must be borne in mind that the prim- 
itive evinces no sense of blood-guilt. To kill an 
enemy is merely to rid oneself of his hated pres- 
ence and quiet at a stroke all fear of his pursuing 
enmity. It is doubtful whether the primitive 
man was capable of a real sense of blood-guilt. 
This would imply that he had a sense of inner 
conflict. It is far more likely that his conflicts 
were with foes without, not foes within, and that 
once the enemy was slain, he thought no more 



14 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

about the matter, save to take certain measures 
that would effectively prevent his enemy's shade 
returning to haunt him. 

Ancient law is tribal, based on the preserva- 
tion of the tribe, and has to do entirely with ex- 
ternals. The blood of the murdered Abel is 
said to have "cried from the ground." But 
Cain's wrath had invaded that most primitive 
and most sacred of social groups, the family, and 
he must be punished. He felt no "blood-guilt." 
The crying out of the spilled blood is to be taken 
literally, for, as Frazer has demonstrated in his 
Golden Bough, the primitive really believed that 
the spirit of the slain dwelt in the blood and 
that the blood cried out the name of the mur- 
derer with a living voice. The folk-lore of all 
nations has similar tales. 

Freud has well pointed out that the desire to 
kill our enemy persists in the Unconscious even 
to-day, and cites the ill-humored jest, "Devil 
take him," as proof, adding that it really means 
"Death take him," which expresses a death-wish 
of the Unconscious, grim and earnest. Of simi- 
lar import is the popular soldier song: 

Some day I'm going to murder the bugler, 
Some day they're going to find him dead. 

This is expressive of the resentment of the 
Unconscious, irritated at being rudely aroused 
from pleasant slumber by the notes of reveille. 

From a great mass of accumulated evidence, 



NATURE OF THE RELIGIOUS PROBLEM 15 

it is certain that the primitive survives in the Un- 
conscious of the individual, and not alone the 
Unconscious of the individual, for there are 
many traces of it in the group life. It is well 
known to modern psychology that dreams are an 
upwelling of the primitive which finds expression 
in more or less highly symbolized terms. It is 
less well known that myths, which are the 
dreams of the race, indicate the same survival 
in the group life. There is the same sort of sym- 
bolism, the same element of wish-fulfilment in 
the myth as in the dream of the individual. 
Certain myths are but the objectification or 
projections of individual experience. Every one 
who has analyzed the dreams of the individual 
is aware of the true significance of these myths, 
which bear a strong family likeness though they 
may have originated among widely diversified 
peoples in widely diversified times and places. 
We are thus enabled to determine the inward 
meaning of the universal flood myth, of which 
variants are found from Babylonia to Scandi- 
navia. Poetry and painting as well as literature 
are full of such symbolism. That which was 
literal in the life of the savage becomes symbo- 
lized and refined in the life of civilized man. 

Primitive religion reeks with phallic sym- 
bolism. Modern religion retains the imagery and 
refines the symbol. Those forms of modern re- 
ligion which are richest in symbolism make the 
widest appeal, because their appeal is to the 



l6 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

primitive. From this symbolism the Uncon- 
scious obtains a sort of derived, if not perfect 
and essential, satisfaction. 

From the primitive desire to propitiate the 
gods and thus ward off evil comes the central 
dogma of Christianity, the dogma of the Atone- 
ment. We have already seen how and why 
modern man feels that he is "born in sin," how 
his inner urge conflicts with the dicta of society, 
which has erected a moral code for the perpetu- 
ation of the race with racial experience as its 
foundation. It therefore follows that as the 
demands of society increase, man's difficulties 
increase, until in a highly organized state of so- 
ciety man will feel that the weight of his sins is 
so great that only the sacrifice of a god can ex- 
piate them. 

Man does not attain to a high degree of cul- 
ture without travail. The primitive man, the 
"old Adam," constantly rises up to overwhelm 
him. Primitive instinct will somehow find an 
outlet. Thus the primitive instinct to propitiate 
the gods becomes refined and symbolized in the 
dogma of the Atonement. 

This is not peculiar to the Christian religion. 
The god Osiris of the Egyptians is slain and 
forced to spend a part of the time in the under- 
world ; Dionysos is slain and his blood is infused 
into the purple grape ; Adonis dies and comes to 
life in a flower; the god of Mithraism dies, 
rises again and thus the sins of his followers are 



NATURE OF THE RELIGIOUS PROBLEM 17 

expiated; Judaism had its sacrificial lamb, 
whence comes the imagery of the Christian 
dogma of the Atonement. The Jewish mind was 
so overwhelmed with the sense of sin that the 
Jewish founders of Christianity could conceive 
of no sacrifice worthy to expiate their sin ex- 
cept the sacrifice of God's First-born, the only 
begotten son! Here indeed is a subversion of 
the lex talionis, which demanded tooth for tooth 
and eye for eye. A world has gone astray 
through the first man's sin (which we saw in the 
first chapter had no ethical significance what- 
ever) and a god must die. Here, then, is the 
origin of the Atonement in man's insatiable 
craving to be right with his gods, to be adjusted 
to the universe in which he lives. 

Since the sex-instinct is the strongest of all 
instincts, the one upon which the perpetuation 
of the race depends, it is to be expected that re- 
ligion should be full of idealized sex emotion. 
The origins of modern religion are so far back 
that their exploration would carry us into the 
most remote reaches of antiquity and among 
strange, primordial peoples. It is extremely 
likely that all religion has a phallic origin. 
Phallic symbols would naturally be the most 
comprehensible symbols to the savage mind, and 
symbols of creation, like creation myths, would 
naturally take a phallic form. 1 The rites of 

1 Coriat: "All creation myths are really symbolizations of an 
individual birth-process applied to cosmic birth-processes: e.g., 
the water is really the amnotic liquor." See page 148. 



l8 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

primitive religion are full of an obvious sex sym- 
bolism. The law upon which Jesus founded his 
gospel: love of God and fellowman, appears late 
in man's religious development, and then as the 
obvious and logical outgrowth of primitive sex 
love. Though this feeling is refined and sub- 
limated in the sophisticated life of civilized man, 
there is no uncertainty as to its origin, and the 
fact that the feeling is refined and sublimated 
does not in the least invalidate the Freudian 
claim for its sex origin. 

A number of examples at once present them- 
selves. The serpent of brass raised up by 
Moses in the wilderness, 1 the pillar before the 
temple gate at Jerusalem, certain early Chris- 
tian symbols: the fish, the Egyptian sign of life 
transformed into the cross — all bespeak a phal- 
lic origin. And just because they are of phallic 
origin and so represent in symbolized form the 
satisfaction of primitive desire, such symbols 
have universal acceptance and are universally 
efficacious in modern religious life. 

The Christian may indignantly deny the phal- 
lic origin of religion. He is conscious of no such 
element in his own religion. Let him, however, 
open-mindedly face the facts. Nothing is gained 
by closing our minds to obvious truths; on the 
other hand, nothing is lost to religion through a 
resolute facing of well-authenticated facts. 

1 See page 8. 



NATURE OF THE RELIGIOUS PROBLEM 19 

Even though religion have a primitive sex origin, 
that is not necessarily all of religion. 

If we but saw life in its true light, we should 
realize that the things of sex are quite as whole- 
some, quite as beautiful, as any other aspect of 
life. It is the prurient mind that sees evil every- 
where and it is a very pernicious kind of educa- 
tion, the result of pruriency, which makes us 
want to repress and ignore sex-instincts, hide 
them from the light and deny their existence 
and their influence upon life. It might be added 
that if the Unconscious gets a derived satis- 
faction from the ministrations of religion, at 
least the individual is saved from falling into 
the temptations of gross animalism. 

Religion is primarily emotional and there- 
fore is, in the broadest sense, of sex origin. 
There is the rationalistic side of religion, but this 
makes no appeal to people in general. This 
aspect of religion is well left to the philosopher 
and the theologian. The validity of religion for 
the regeneration of human life lies not in its 
power to convince, not in the cold-blooded and 
logical statement of dogma in which the in- 
quirer is urged to believe ; it does not lie at all in 
the field of rationalized belief, but in the great 
emotional upheavals of conversion and the rev- 
erence for the Divine engendered through the 
use of the universal symbol. Its good inheres 
in man's emotional life through which it works 
profound changes in his character and may, if 



20 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

intelligently applied, free him from his inner 
conflicts and put him in tune with life. When 
these conflicts are resolved, then the ethical na- 
ture of religion appears, for then, and not until 
then, is a man prepared to take his place in the 
world as an efficient worker, a good neighbor, 
and a good citizen in the society in which he 
lives. Whatever happens, he must be freed 
from his sense of sin. 

The specific means by which this is consum- 
mated will be left for ampler discussion in suc- 
ceeding chapters. 



II. THE NATURE OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

AND ITS INFLUENCE ON THE 

RELIGIOUS LIFE 

i. The Nature of the Unconscious 

MAN walks through this life his footsteps 
ever attended by an unseen companion. 
This comrade of his waking and his sleeping 
hours, like the Daemon of Socrates or the fa- 
miliar of Mohammed which sat perched upon 
his shoulder in the form of a dove, is forever 
whispering momentous messages in his ear. It 
is the Unconscious. 

It has long been known to psychology that an 
active psychic life goes on "subliminally," or be- 
low the threshold of consciousness. Until very 
recently, however, the true nature and function 
of the Unconscious were little known. Certain 
evidences of its activities in waking life were 
all that we had. Every one has had the ex- 
perience of having to make a momentous de- 
cision or solve a difficult problem, and "sleep- 
ing on it," when, after some eight or nine hours 
of sleep, the decision almost makes itself, or the 
problem seems to solve itself. Some activity 
has been at work which needed only the diver- 



22 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

sion of our attention or rather a state of inatten- 
tion (which sleep is said to be by modern psy- 
chology), a state of passivity, in order to func- 
tion and bring order out of chaos. We are 
vaguely conscious that some inner force has been 
at work. Again, we are conscious of vague 
emotional disturbances that nothing in our out- 
ward life, no external stimulus, seems to war- 
rant. It is the Unconscious. 

Within the last few years, by a variety of 
technical procedures, the earliest of which is 
hypnosis, the latest and most efficacious psycho- 
analysis, the content of the Unconscious, has 
been brought to light and its varied functions de- 
termined. Other methods of tapping the Un- 
conscious are by the use of ouija, planchette, 
crystal-gazing, and automatic writing. These 
have been successful to some degree, but the re- 
sult has never been entirely satisfactory, for the 
element of suggestion is likely to be too strong 
and the resistance of the subject too great for 
these methods to penetrate into the deeper re- 
cess of the Unconscious. 

The Unconscious is a repository of memories 
and percepts, that is of experiences of the past, 
with all their attendant emotions. It is a ver- 
itable store-house of primitive emotions. In 
the first chapter we saw how fear is perhaps the 
first of man's emotions, since he feels himself 
surrounded by enemies natural and supernatu- 
ral. This primitive fear, which doubtless serves 



NATURE OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 23 

a useful, protective purpose in primordial life, 
persists in the Unconscious of civilized man, 
where it seems to serve no purpose whatever. 
Certain racial memories as well as the collective 
experience of the individual are preserved in the 
Unconscious. It never manifests itself to waking 
consciousness as concept or idea except as it is 
brought to light through some of the technical 
means mentioned above. It does manifest itself 
emotionally with tremendous and even over- 
whelming force in our conscious life, and sym- 
bolically in dreams, visions, reveries, and 
hallucinations. "It is the realm of repressed 
desires and wishes often carried over from early 
childhood or even infancy. . . . (Its) only 
function is wishing or desiring." (Coriat.) 

This strange alter ego is responsible for our 
desires, our prejudices, our loves, our hates. Who 
has not had the experience of meeting a total 
stranger and feeling a slight wave of repugnance 
sweep over him? The feeling is unaccountable 
so far as our conscious mental processes are con- 
cerned. But, as a matter of fact, some uncon- 
scious memory stored in the Unconscious, a 
memory of a person or a circumstance unpleas- 
ant to recall, is stirred, hence the faint wave of 
dislike. Being deep-rooted in the Unconscious, 
this familiar feeling has given rise to the tradi- 
tion that first impressions are trustworthy. The 
Unconscious has spoken and declared that we 
are going to dislike this person. Every act, 



24 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

thought, or mannerism of such a person is there- 
fore likely to offend us, no matter how innocent 
it may be, for these keep stirring the recollection 
of the original person or event that made us un- 
happy. Thus we fulfill the prophecy of our own 
Unconscious. 

The Unconscious is indolent and insatiable. 
It has an aversion to the needful work we must 
do, it would sleep and eat, it is Appetite, and 
constantly demands that we cease from useful 
work to appease it. 

Nevertheless, it performs certain useful func- 
tions. It determines the nature of our person- 
ality, it is the foundation of character, it is the 
subterranean part of the house of life, of which 
conscious life is the super-structure. From per- 
sonal experience, and the testimony of creative 
artists: writers, musicians, painters, it would 
seem that one of its functions is to absorb psy- 
chic material, re-assemble it, and give it forth 
in ordered, artistic form. The so-called "incu- 
bation period" of a nuclear idea in which it 
comes to full development is the period during 
which the Unconscious is at work upon it. All 
inspiration, so-called, rises from the Uncon- 
scious. 

It is of far greater extent, if one may speak 
of it spatially, than waking consciousness. It 
is unlikely that any memory of a lifetime, in- 
cluding the earliest years, ever escapes it. 

Janet and Charcot in France, Freud in Vienna, 



NATURE OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 25 

William James, Morton Prince, and Joseph 
Jastrow in America, have been pioneers in this 
vast and interesting field. It was as long ago as 
1 88 1 that Freud and his associate, Breuer, dis- 
covered that a hysterical patient obtained no 
relief from her malady through the customary 
methods of psycho-therapy until certain facts of 
her case, which had not been related because 
they were not accessible to her waking conscious- 
ness, were brought to light by a method which 
afterward was elaborated into the modern psy- 
cho-analytic treatment. Janet and Charcot 
made the same discovery through hypnotic 
methods. Morton Prince, in his treatment of 
disassociated personalities, explored the field of 
the Unconscious and has contributed some valu- 
able information on the subject. Joseph Jas- 
trow's book, The Subconscious, while it is not 
strictly up-to-date, is interesting reading and 
throws light on the nature and function of the 
Unconscious. 

It is therefore well established that such a 
psychic life exists in both normal and abnormal 
individuals. James went so far as to claim that 
the Unconscious of every individual is a bay or 
inlet from a vast sea of consciousness, which 
embraces the subliminal psychic life of all in- 
dividuals, and from the waters of which we 
draw at pleasure. The psychic series of waking 
life, he claimed, are like the crests of waves of 
the sea, apparently disconnected on the surface, 



26 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

but connected in one logical sequence beneath 
the surface. This would bear out Emerson's 
and Browning's contention that the seeming dis- 
continuity of life is due to our lack of grasp of 
the whole. Prince {The Unconscious, page 21) 
speaks of a patient who in a hypnotic state 
claimed to be in a mental world wherein is to 
be found "not only everything that has ever 
happened or will happen, but all thoughts, 
dreams, imaginations." Patients as they go 
under the influence of an anaesthetic report a 
feeling of an enlarged field of consciousness, as 
if their consciousness widened until it grasped 
the universe. This, of course, is due to a dis- 
persion of attention, to a loss of focus, compa- 
rable to that of a day-dream; the patient actu- 
ally has less grasp of reality, rather than more, 
his attention is not increased but diffused, and 
his faculties are soon entirely dispersed in a deep 
sleep, far deeper than norma]/ This theory of 
James therefore remains to be proved. The 
Unconscious is fantastic enough in its varied 
manifestations without recourse to metaphysics. 
In the Unconscious ifmeres what Freud calls 
the "complex." The term would naturally de- 
note a combination of things. It is used by 
Freud to signify "an idea around which emo- 
tions are grouped and in which they center." 
It might be compared to a snow-ball rolling 
down hill. It not only gathers momentum as it 
rolls, but it catches up more snow, pebbles, twigs, 



NATURE OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 27 

as it rolls, until, if only the slope be long enough, 
it will become an avalanche, catching up trees, 
houses, villages, and hurling them to destruc- 
tion. The complex has its beginning in very 
early life, so early that its beginning escapes 
conscious memory. It may start from some 
event of an unpleasant nature; it is mostly due 
to fixations which are never broken up. It is not 
always evil. All psychic life develops through 
some complex. The avaricious person has a 
"money complex." Freud speaks of a "pro- 
fession complex," which makes a man jealous 
for his own success in his profession. There are 
so-called "habit complexes," by which a man 
learns to sink the technique of, let us say, the 
machinist or the pianist, into the mechanical, 
leaving his mind free for the more delicate de- 
tails of his work, or the interpretative side of 
music. A complex is really what may be termed 
a constellation; it is like stars that group them- 
selves together; in this constellation we group 
ideas and give them an emotional tinge. As we 
shall see later, a complex will gather to itself 
any new ideas which come into consciousness 
and give them its own emotional tinge. The 
shade of emotion which any new idea takes on 
is due to some complex. Life, as we shall see 
in the chapter on the "Motivation of Human 
Life," is complex-ruled. 

Now there are in our psychic life what have 
been called "fixations." The child fixes its love 



28 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

upon its mother, but in the earliest years only 
as a means of gratifying its appetite. It derives 
nourishment from her; she tends it, puts it to 
bed, feeds it. She is its first love. Thus the 
earliest object of its love is its mother. This is 
perfectly normal in the child; but when it 
reaches the age of puberty, its love should be 
turned away from the mother to the world with- 
out. So long as its love is fixed entirely upon 
the mother, it is selfish, egocentric. 

From such a fixation of love upon one or the 
other parent which persists beyond the earliest 
childhood, proceeds the most vicious complex 
which the new psychology has so far discovered. 
That is the GEdipus-complex. The neuroses, or 
nervous ills, are due to some vicious complex. 
The most fruitful in this respect is the (Edipus- 
complex, founded upon the (Edipus-myth. 

CEdipus was the son of Laius, king of Thebes, 
and Jocasta. An oracle informed his father that 
his son, still unborn, would be his murderer. 
Thereupon the father planned his destruction. 
He was, however, rescued and was brought up at 
a foreign court as the king's son. Being in doubt 
as to his origin, he consulted an oracle, and was 
told to avoid his native place, for he was des- 
tined to become the murderer of his father and 
the husband of his mother. He met King Laius, 
his father, on the road leading away from his 
supposed home and killed him in a sudden quar- 
rel. He came to the gates of Thebes, where he 



NATURE OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 29 

solved the riddle of the Sphinx and was elected 
king by the Thebans and given the hand of Jo- 
casta, his mother, as a reward. All seemed to 
go well for some years, until finally a plague 
broke out. Again the oracle was consulted and 
it answered that when the murderer of Laius was 
discovered and driven from the country, the 
plague would cease. It transpired that GEdipus 
was the murderer and that he was the son of the 
murdered man, therefore the son of Jocasta, by 
whom he had had two sons and two daughters. 
Thus the oracle was fulfilled: he was the mur- 
derer of his father and had become the husband 
of his mother by whom he had children. (Edi- 
pus then put out his own eyes and wandered 
forth from his native place, for the oracle had 
been fulfilled. Sophocles wrought this legend 
into one of the most moving tragedies ever 
written. 

When the fixation of infantile love upon the 
mother, a perfectly normal thing in early child- 
hood, persists into youth and maturity, it be- 
comes a vicious complex. The complex is 
normal in infancy, abnormal afterward. This 
Freud has called the "GEdipus-complex." If 
the fixation persists, the individual is inhibited 
in his normal love-life, and is almost certain to 
develop some neurosis in the struggle that en- 
sues between the demands of society and the 
inner urge of his bad complex. When the fixa- 
tion of the male child is reversed, and we have a 



30 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

fixation of the female child upon the father, we 
have the so-called Electra-complex which is just 
a reversal of the (Edipus-complex. Freud goes 
so far as to claim that all neuroses in the male 
are due to some form of the (Edipus-complex. 

There is nothing essentially abnormal about 
such a complex in itself. The abnormality con- 
sists in the retention of it beyond early child- 
hood. The normal individual breaks away from 
his infantile fixations and fixes his love 
upon some individual of the opposite sex in the 
outer world. But the victim of the (Edipus- 
complex cannot love normally. He becomes 
"introverted," his love-life is directed to his 
mother or to her image in his mind, and he is 
prevented from loving any other. This often 
results in auto-eroticism, self-love, a very vicious 
thing. The fixation, then, results in a repression 
of the normal sex-craving. At first glance, this 
might not seem so disastrous, inasmuch as the 
sex-feeling is over-developed in some individu- 
als, and in others it can never come to expression 
all their life long. However, the worst aspect 
of it is that the instinct is not in such cases 
destroyed or atrophied, it is merely repressed 
into the Unconscious by stern and unremitting 
effort, whence it forces its way to expression 
along some path other than normal. From this 
repression and the consequent explosions arise 
the neuroses, the hysterias, homoeroticism 1 and 

1 Homoeroticism (homosexuality), or love for the same sex, 
will be explained in a later chapter. 



NATURE OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 31 

certain of the psychoses. Great unhappiness, 
deep despair, is the result. 

Moreover, and this seems one of the saddest 
phases of the whole problem, when the energy- 
generated by sex-instinct is violently repressed, 
all other energy is repressed, and the individual, 
incapable, enervated, listless, depressed he 
knows not why, lives far below his normal level 
of energy and usefulness. He is unfitted for 
society, unfitted to do his life-work and fight 
his life's battles. This is because his energy is 
dissipated by a needless and futile unconscious 
inner conflict. How he may resolve this conflict 
must be left for discussion in a later chapter. 

How widespread traces of neurotic taint are, 
no one can realize until his eyes are opened. It 
is safe to say that nine persons out of ten are not 
living up to the level of their full capacity nor 
directing all their available energy toward social 
ends, that not one in ten tastes life's beaker 
brimming full. Some inner conflict inhibits the 
full use of their powers. 

What an interesting side-light is thrown upon 
religion by our knowledge of the Unconscious! 
Religion, as I have said, is primarily emotional 
rather than intellectual or volitional. Inasmuch 
as our emotional life inheres in the Unconscious, 
it is readily seen that the Unconscious must play 
an important role in the formation of religious 
ideals, the development of religious thought, the 
construction of religious systems. It has been 



32 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

cynically remarked that the German Reforma- 
tion was started because the monk Luther fell 
in love with a nun. This of course is but ill- 
humored jest, nevertheless these emotions which 
are the very basis of human life have played a 
large part in the determination of the world's 
thought in Religion. 



2. The Influence of the Unconscious on 
Religious Ideals 

The neurologist is well aware that the object 
of every neurosis is a flight from reality. The 
neurotic finds reality too harsh to bear, and 
actually takes refuge in a serious nervous ill- 
ness in which he creates a world to suit his own 
fancy. A patient suffering from a heavy neuro- 
sis remarked to me, "The whole world seems un- 
real to me, it is a dream-world, a world of shad- 
ows. Reality is in the world to come." This 
shut-in tendency 1 is characteristic of the neu- 
roses, certain of the psychoses, and a like trend 
of thought is to be observed in religious systems. 
When this " other- worldliness" permeates a so- 
cial group, it gives rise to a new religious move- 
ment. The more harsh and stern the real world 
in which the religious devotee dwells, the 
brighter and more perfect the heavenly kingdom, 
the world of his fancy. 

The Christian religion had its rise under hard 

1 Called by the new psychology "introversion." 



NATURE OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 33 

conditions in a nation which had long lost its 
autonomy. The little nation of Israel had, 
in the time of Jesus, become but an insignificant 
part of the great Graeco-Roman world, a small 
Roman province with a Roman governor. Its 
people suffered from violent repression of all 
national ambition and ideals. All was lost save 
their sense of nationality, their pride of race. To 
be sure, there was a religio-political body which 
had nominal authority, the Sanhedrim, entirely 
Jewish in its constituency. But the trial of 
Jesus, with its tragic conclusion under Pontius 
Pilate, illustrates the futility of the Sanhedrim's 
attempts to exercise political authority. That 
such a body had any real power was merely a 
convention, a convenient fiction by which an 
oppressed and miserable people could be kept 
tolerably contented and satisfied. 

Here, then, was this oppressed people, help- 
less, defeated in their national ambitions and 
purposes, powerless to realize their national 
ideals, with little hope in the present. For many 
years prior to the life of Jesus they had been 
looking for adventitious aid. Some time in the 
future, God would set up a heavenly kingdom, 
a New Jerusalem upon earth, with a Messiah as 
its priest-king. (This, of course, was an earthly 
Paradise which was merely a projection of their 
own wishes.) The temple service would be re- 
stored in all its traditional magnificence and 
splendor; peace and prosperity would supersede 



34 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

misery and want. The chosen people, the Jews, 
would dwell in this heavenly city, feasting and 
rejoicing, under the beneficent rule of their Mes- 
siah, bathed in a light that never shone on sea or 
land. 

Here we have a group-wish exactly analogous 
to the individuars neurotic desire to escape from 
the objective world into a self -created kingdom. 
The dream of an individual is a wish-fulfilment; 
the New Jerusalem of Jewish apocalyptic litera- 
ture is the dream, the wish-fulfilment of a whole 
people. 

We are here taken into the region of myth, 
which, as Freud and Abraham {Dreams and 
Myths) have clearly demonstrated, represents 
the dream-life of the race, with all the charac- 
teristics of heightened existence, idealized con- 
ditions, and the element of wish-fulfilment 
strongly emphasized. 

Such was the condition, such were the dreams 
of the Jewish people when Christianity was 
born. Jesus, except for certain Masochistic or 
self-abasement tendencies, seems to have been 
free from neurosis. He advocated the setting 
free of the love-life which the religion of 
Judaism had repressed. He advocated the 
ethical application of the Gospel of love in man's 
every-day life. His Gospel was one of expres- 
sion, not repression. 

Hardly was this Gospel proclaimed, when its 
stream was mingled with the apocalyptic 



NATURE OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 35 

idealism of the Jewish race. Hardly was Jesus 
dead, when the new-born Christian movement 
became a little, provincial Jewish sect in Jeru- 
salem with James, his brother, as its leader, 
which insisted upon circumcision as a condition 
of membership! All the old repressions were 
again in force. 

And now a new figure appears upon the scene 
and his appearance is portentous. It is Paul, the 
Jewish tent-maker, trained in Rabbinical schools 
and the philosophy of the Graeco-Roman world. 
Like so many theologians, past and present, Paul 
is the victim of a heavy neurosis. It is his "thorn 
in the flesh." His own love-life is violently re- 
pressed. He is embittered with life because he 
cannot fulfill the law of the flesh; he seeks to 
compensate by strict observance of the Jewish 
ecclesiastical law; he is seeking outlet for vio- 
lently repressed emotion. He is sadistic, derives 
pleasure from the suffering of others. On no 
other theory can the personality of Paul be 
understood. Paul becomes the protagonist of 
orthodox Judaism which is assailed by this new 
sect of Christians; he looks on with lustful 
pleasure while the youthful Stephen is stoned. 

"As a Jew," says Oskar Pfister (pages 462- 
463, the Psycho-analytic Method), "(Paul) 
suffers from an anxiety-neurosis because he can- 
not fulfill the 'law of the flesh' or the 'law in the 
members' according to the law of the spirit. So 
much the more fanatically does he hold to the 



36 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

'Law of Moses' (obsessional neurotic displace- 
ment). He hates Christ because the latter re- 
places the law by the free demands of love, and 
therewith disturbs the complex-need, the cere- 
monialism and orthodoxy." 

Paul is the victim of hysterical hallucinations. 
He has been termed an epileptic; he exhibits 
much more clearly the symptoms of an anxiety- 
hysteria. As he proceeds upon the road to Dam- 
ascus with authority from the high-priest to 
persecute the hated Christians, he suffers an in- 
tense anxiety-attack: there is a sudden welling- 
up of repressed emotion, there is a vision, a 
bright light and a voice (visual and auditory 
hallucinations). This is coincident with a "fall- 
ing" and is immediately followed by hysterical 
blindness. He has refused to see the truth of 
the Gospel of Jesus, therefore, his Unconscious 
declares, he shall see nothing. 1 Henceforth, by 

1 In Acts 9: if. we read: "But Saul yet breathing threatening 
and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord, went unto the 
high-priest and asked of him letters to Damascus," etc. It is 
evident that Paul came almost immediately from the stoning of 
the young Stephen, where he had been an interested, if horrified, 
onlooker. All his sadistic passions were doubtless roused by the 
sight. But doubtless, likewise, he was horrified at this cruel, 
bloody death. He wanted to see no more. When, therefore, there 
was the great uprush of hysterical emotion as he proceeded 
along the Damascus road, there was a great revulsion of feeling. 
Paul desired to shut out from consciousness the sight of the 
dying Stephen, "falling asleep" with words of forgiveness upon 
his lips. Doubtless he thought, "Would that I had never seen the 
sight!" He violently repressed the memory; he refused to see 



NATURE OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 37 

the principle of ambivalence, the law of op- 
posites, by which an emotion is turned into one 
of opposing character, Paul is masochistic 
whereas before he was strongly sadistic. Hence- 
forth he will transfer to his own person the 
cruelties which before he inflicted upon others. 
Only thus can we understand the endurance of 
his later life. 

Pfister considers that in the emotional ca- 
tharsis of the significant event on the Damascus 
road, Paul "abreacted" (a term used by Freud 
for getting rid of painful emotional matter by 
bringing it into consciousness and re-living it) 
and freed himself from the repression caused by 
his complex (undoubtedly the (Edipus-com- 
plex), and that thereafter Paul was a free man. 
This is improbable in view of his later teachings. 
To the end of his life he is opposed to the normal 
love-life, advises that his followers refrain from 
marriage, since marriage means yielding to the 
"lusts of the flesh," evinces an abnormal attitude 

it. By the well-known mechanism that causes hysterical blind- 
ness, his wish was fulfilled. He not only ceased to see the painful 
spectacle in which he had taken so active a part, but he ceased 
to see anything. Coriat says (Abnormal Psychology, Second 
Edition, page 308): "Hysterical blindness may also occur, usu- 
ally appearing and disappearing suddenly. In all these hysterical 
disturbances of sight the optic nerve is found to be absolutely 
normal. ..." Pfister reports in his Psycho-analytic Method 
cases of greatly dimmed vision. Wilfrid Lay (Man's Uncon- 
scious Conflict, page 222) reports the case of a man who hated 
his wife and suffered from hysterical blindness, a kind of re- 
fusal to see her which became a general refusal to see anything. 



38 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

toward woman, in that he advises her to be in 
subjection to man, to keep silent in the churches 
and to appear with head (that is, face) covered 
in Christian assemblage. 

It was the Gospel of Paul, not the Gospel of 
Jesus, which finally conquered the Mediter- 
ranean world. Upon this Gospel and the 
Johannine ideal modern Christianity is founded, 
with all of its Puritanical ideals, its ignoring of 
sex, its "subduing of the flesh," the repression 
of natural instinct, the attention diverted from 
the world of present-day reality to the unknown 
future when the saints shall inherit houses not 
made with hands. 

This Gospel spread rapidly through the sub- 
merged classes of the Mediterranean world; it 
was a "slaves' religion" which held out hopes to 
a class who had no hope in the present, of better 
things to come in the life beyond death. By fo- 
cussing their attention upon the Heavenly King- 
dom, it made them content to endure their 
dreary earthly life with toleration and some 
equanimity, if not with satisfaction. 

The neurotic symptoms of Paul are to be 
noted in the collective ideals and life of early 
Christendom. There is, for instance, a strong 
masochistic element which has survived even to 
this day. The Roman Christians were not only 
willing and ready for martyrdom for the sake of 
their belief, they actually courted it, partly, at 
least, for the masochistic pleasure they derived 



NATURE OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 39 

from suffering, and partly as a means of quick 
deliverance from the intolerable present into a 
glowing land of the future where they were to 
receive their reward. 

Christianity has ignored the sex question ex- 
cept in so far as it condemns the satisfaction of 
natural instinct — this is Christianity's legiti- 
mate inheritance from the neurotic Paul. To 
the extent that it has followed his teaching, it 
has upheld an emasculate, ascetic ideal, an ideal 
of unsexed sainthood rather than an ideal of 
social usefulness. The resulting repression, as 
we have seen, has militated against the highest 
social efficiency, for it impairs human energy. 
Until recently, at least (see chapter on "The 
Changing Basis of Religion" for the other side 
of the picture), withdrawal from a harsh and 
cruel world which slew its saints and prophets 
and despitefully used those whose feet were set 
in the Way was the set purpose and most con- 
vincing evidence of perfect, though persecuted, 
sainthood. Those Christians who have been 
condemned by circumstances to be in the world, 
have always taken a certain Pharisaic pride in 
the fact that they are not of the world. Again, 
the heritage of Paul. 

The further we look into the matter, the more 
we see the prominent role that the Unconscious, 
especially in certain abnormal activities, has 
played in religion and especially the Christian 
religion. Here is the sequence: first, a Jesus 



40 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

seeking to free men from the evil restrictions 
and vicious repressions of Pharisaic, formalistic 
religion ; then a Paul, with heavy neurotic taint, 
restoring the Pharisaic mode of life and impos- 
ing new restrictions even while he sought to 
preach the freedom of the Christian Gospel; 
then, a whole people with face averted from the 
present where their work and their life-interests 
lay, and turned toward the Heavenly City 
through whose portals they hoped soon to pass ; 
finally, this neurotic, unnatural, morbid ideal 
pursuing generation after generation even down 
to the present day. 

In succeeding chapters we shall trace the 
course of neuroses and hysterias in certain re- 
ligious movements and certain religious types. 
As preparation for such discussion, however, it 
is well to look into the unconscious motivation 
of human life. 



III. THE MOTIVATION OF 
HUMAN LIFE 

NO man ever acts or can act from entirely 
unmixed and disinterested motives. Our 
altruistic feelings and selfless deeds are bound 
in the very nature of things to have some ele- 
ment of the purely personal and individual ; the 
lofty thoughts of the generous lover of man- 
kind, the deeds of greatest heroism, are subject 
in some measure to the "pleasure-pain reac- 
tion"; they are determined to some degree by 
their effect upon our own lives. Were a man to 
rise entirely above this plane he would be more 
than human ; even Jesus cried out in a moment 
of agony, "My God, my God, why hast thou 
forsaken me?" We must give the Hedonistic 
philosophers a qualified approval; they are 
partly right; their fault lies in their extrava- 
gance, in their inordinate claims that all men 
act always from none but selfish motives. 

We may indignantly deny that all our deeds 
have some admixture of selfish motive, espe- 
cially if we are socially minded. This is not 
surprising, for the selfish element in unselfish 
acts lies not in the Conscious, but in the Uncon- 
scious, which is a veritable vortex of selfish 
impulse. 

4 1 



42 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

Let us see how this unconscious motivation 
works out in human life, how it is manifested in 
symptomatic acts of every-day and in dreams 
at night. When a subject is hypnotized and told 
that at a certain hour, it may be as late as the 
following day, when he has regained his waking 
consciousness, he will perform a given act, but 
will forget the suggestion of the hypnotist, it 
invariably happens that he carries out the sug- 
gestion; when asked why he did this, he will not 
reply that he was told to do it and is carrying 
out the suggestion of another, but will give some 
ratioral pretext. A teacher was told during 
hypnotic trance that at a certain hour she would 
remove a wooden cone from her desk and place 
it upon the flat top of the school-room stove. 
She did so, but when asked her reason for this 
somewhat unusual act, replied that the cone was 
in her way and that she needed her desk cleared 
for certain papers which she wished to examine. 

It is quite likely that all of our acts are thus 
unconsciously as well as consciously motivated. 
The Unconscious assists us in all our decisions 
from the slight and apparently petty acts of 
every-day to those momentous decisions that 
decide a life-career. Thus, many a man has 
gone on the stage or into some similar profession 
where he will be in the limelight because there 
remains in his Unconscious a remnant of that 
childish "exhibitionism' ' which every individual 
manifests at some time in his early life, this in- 



THE MOTIVATION OF HUMAN LIFE 43 

fantile desire to show himself before the public. 
Every one has had dreams of being unclothed 
in public, and the significant aspect of the 
matter is that he felt no concern, often it is 
rather a feeling of elation. The Arabian Nights 
has a folk-tale of a prince who was caught up 
by a genie and set down before the gate of a 
distant city in his night attire. The little symp- 
tomatic acts of every-day life are full of such 
unconscious motivation. One morning I was 
thinking of some acquaintances who were os- 
tentatious, empty-headed, and purse-proud. 
Soon afterward a bit of music began singing 
itself through my consciousness. At first I was 
at a loss to identify it; then I recognized it as 
the final movement of Sir Edward Elgar's 
march, "Pomp and Circumstance," a composi- 
tion which the composer admitted to be some- 
what empty and pretentious, and which had not 
come to mind in some years. Afterward, when 
I endeavored consciously to recall this bit, it 
eluded me and does to this day. 

Giving a logical pretext for the unconsciously 
motivated act is called "rationalization." To 
satisfy its craving for the limelight, the Uncon- 
scious will go to great extremes. However, the 
real unconscious motive for acts that reveal a 
desire for esteem could not be divulged to our 
fellows, it would appear too puerile; hence we 
must furnish some altruistic or at least rational 
reason for our acts. A man may not even be 



44 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

conscious that he desires to be considered su- 
perior to his fellows or even desires to feel that 
way, but in his Unconscious this is one of his 
strongest cravings. Let us state it conversely: 
no one is so unhappy as he who is consistently 
and completely ignored by his fellow men. The 
adolescent girl, just waking to the meaning of 
life, just beginning to grow socially minded, 
craving companionship and affectionate notice, 
is, on account of some personal defect — phys- 
ical plainness or lack of personal charm — rele- 
gated to the background. Perhaps a more 
attractive sister claims the attention of youthful 
admirers. At once the young girl is desperately 
unhappy. Her Unconscious is thwarted in its 
deepest desire. So with men in business or in 
politics; some men will go to any lengths to be 
"in the public eye," so strong and insatiable is 
this craving. In greater or less degree, we all 
long for attention and admiration. A certain 
amount is necessary for our well-being and hap- 
piness. It furnishes a stimulus for activity. To 
withdraw utterly from the world and live in se- 
clusion is one of the greatest hardships man can 
endure, compensated for only by the fact that 
he is thus enabled to do some useful work in 
seclusion or that it gives him opportunity to 
build up an autistic world of his own. 

There is no particular harm in this mixed 
motivation in human life except where it leads 
men to trample upon other lives in order to sue- 



THE MOTIVATION OF HUMAN LIFE 45 

ceed. The esteem in which a man is held who 
has made a definite and valuable contribution 
to human knowledge, or has striven in any social 
activity to make the world better, is the just 
meed of his struggle and privation. But it is 
well for men to be conscious of this mixed 
motivation; it is well for them to face facts 
rather than to live in a world of convenient self- 
deception. A short auto-analysis will often re- 
veal to a man the origin of his motives. 

As an example of the self-deception practiced 
from unconscious motives, we might cite the in- 
dividual who "enjoys ill health." He thinks he 
suffers, and no doubt he does, but day and night 
he is dinning in the ears of unwilling listeners 
the story of his sufferings. He takes keen pleas- 
ure in this recital, oft-repeated, for it lends him 
a certain distinction. He has a rare disease, 
chronic and incurable; ten eminent physicians 
have worked on his case without result; he has 
spent thousands of dollars and obtained no re- 
lief. He is thus set apart from his fellows, he 
is a vara avis and by this means gains a distinc- 
tion he would otherwise lack. He does not 
realize that he derives pleasure from his own 
unhappiness and suffering. This trivial ex- 
ample illustrates a common trait, namely, "com- 
pensation." 

We have a proverb, "to make a virtue of 
necessity." The Unconscious, wherever there 
is physical weakness or psychic disability, will 



46 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

strive to compensate for it in another direction, 
or even to enthrone that very weakness as a 
virtue. The conversation of children aptly il- 
lustrates this sort of compensation. One boy is 
stronger than another and comes off victorious 
in a hand-to-hand struggle. "Never mind," 
says the defeated boy, "my father can whip 
your father," or, "My father is richer than your 
father," or, "My father knows everything." 
This trait is most clearly seen in children; in 
adult life it is covered with a decent cloak of 
social tact. 

Nevertheless, the trait persists; the Uncon- 
scious will not tolerate a feeling of inferiority; 
in every life there is a strong tendency to com- 
pensate for any sort of weakness. Napoleon 
Buonaparte was a man of short stature with 
some neurotic or epileptic weakness. He com- 
pensated for this weakness by laying plans to 
conquer the world. Julius Caesar was a slight 
man, "with a weak voice," also subject to some 
physical or psychic disability. He, too, became 
a conqueror. We have already noted Paul's 
neurosis and his endeavors at compensation. 
The man who through physical weakness can- 
not excel! in physical contests, hies him to his 
books and seeks to excell in scholarship. A man 
who lacks commanding personality will strive to 
become wealthy or famous to impress his fellows 
and satisfy his unconscious craving for whole- 
ness or normality. 



THE MOTIVATION OF HUMAN LIFE 47 

The individual thus succeeds through com- 
pensation for his weaker qualities; not merely 
in spite of them, but actually because of them. 
They become a goad that continually spurs him 
on to fresh effort. They arouse his latent 
courage, put him on his mettle, drive him to 
accomplishment. 

Dr. Alfred Adler of Vienna has developed 
this theory interestingly and convincingly. Ac- 
cording to him, the neurosis invariably arises 
not from repression, but from a feeling of or- 
ganic inferiority. Organs of sight, or hearing, 
sex-organs, digestive apparatus, all play a part 
in the origin and development of the neurosis, 
if they have some inherent weakness. The neu- 
rosis represents the attempt of the patient to 
reach some goal which he has (unconsciously) in 
mind. He observes himself, and comes to a re- 
alization that he is not up to normal standards 
in some (physical) respect. And he is driven by 
this consciousness to become a whole man. As 
Adler says, "The case of the neurotic might be 
represented by some such formula as this, 'I am 
not a man' (i.e., a whole, normal man), 'but 
I will be a man.' " In cases of homo-eroticism, 
the patient says to himself, "I have a feminine 
figure; I have feminine desires, nevertheless I 
must become a man." The neurosis is the 
struggle to attain full-fledged manhood. The 
patient sets up for himself a "fictitious" or un- 
real goal, toward which he purposes to work 



48 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

until it is attained. This goal is often ridiculous; 
nevertheless he is driven to attain it. It is often 
futile enough. If he worked toward a real goal, 
something that would be of social usefulness, it 
would not be so bad, but his goal is an impos- 
sible, vague, and useless thing. If attained, it 
would benefit no one. Here we have the reason 
for the over-weening ambition and cruel egotism 
of the neurotic. He must attain his impossible 
goal at all costs. "The whole (clinical) picture 
of the sexual-neurosis," says Adler, "is an al- 
legory in which is reflected the distance of the 
patient from his fictitious masculine end-motive, 
and demonstrates how he seeks to overcome this 
distance." (Ueber den Nervosen Ckarakter, 
page 5.) "The character traits, especially the 
neurotic ones, serve as psychic means and forms 
of expression for bringing about the guidance of 
the life opinions, acquiring a place, gaining a 
fixed point in the fluctuations of existence, in 
order to attain the final goal, the feeling of su- 
periority." (Ibid p. 8.) With Pfister, I am 
inclined to think that Adler attributes too much 
significance to this feeling of inferiority and its 
influence on the neurosis. It is doubtless a con- 
tributing cause of many neuroses and often a 
weighty influence. His theories are to be re- 
garded as elaborating rather than contradicting 
those of Freud, and for the practical psycho- 
analyst may be utilized in conjunction with 
those of Freud. Neuroses may originate from 



THE MOTIVATION OF HUMAN LIFE 49 

many and varied causes of which organic in- 
feriority is doubtless one and an important one, 
but there are many neuroses which do not seem 
at all to root in such inferiority. We shall cling 
to the idea that fixation and repression are the 
fundamental cause. Of greater value for the 
physician, I believe, are Adler's deductions from 
internal secretions, which play so large a part in 
metabolism. The study of these and their effect 
upon physical and psychic life is still in its in- 
fancy. A discussion of this matter of course 
belongs to the realm of medicine and therefore 
we cannot discuss it here. 

Let us turn to a consideration of the mechan- 
ism by which human life is motivated. How 
does the Unconscious accomplish the results we 
have noted? Through the complex. We have 
previously seen how human life is complex- 
ruled. The human personality is an elusive 
thing, difficult to comprehend, difficult to ap- 
praise in another, because we have not the same 
complex as he. The complex determines our 
lives and our outlook upon life. Every man, 
unless his philosophical training leads him to 
take a contrary view, believes that he sees life 
as it is, that he apprehends Reality immediately 
and completely, that he sees truth clear and 
whole. He cannot be convinced of the contrary. 
Yet every human being has in reality his own 
individual point of view, he sees life refracted 
through the prism of his own personality, his 



50 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

own volitions, his own emotions, in a word life 
is colored by his complexes, therefore by the 
Unconscious. A certain emotion has been 
aroused in his earliest childhood by a certain 
act or idea, a certain experience, and in this 
other ideas and emotions become "constel- 
lated"; this, with its accretions, forms a complex 
which, unless it be broken up by a peculiar train 
of circumstances, an emotional upheaval, or 
some psycho-therapeutic method, will rule his 
thought and his acts all his life long. 

We are as much at the mercy of these com- 
plexes as the negro slave was at the mercy of 
his white master in the South of ante-bellum 
days. Some writers consider the complex a 
symptom of an abnormal psychic state; others, 
while they admit it as a factor in the normal in- 
dividual's psychic life, hold that it is always suf- 
fused with unpleasant emotion. Wilfrid Lay, in 
his book, Marts Unconscious Conflict, states 
that "Complex is the name given by psycho- 
analysis to an idea or group of ideas with which 
is associated a tone of unpleasant feeling which 
keeps or tends to keep the complex out of Con- 
sciousness." (Page 112.) I am not in agree- 
ment with this, for the complex may be associ- 
ated with pleasant feeling, and unpleasant 
feelings may be aroused only when the complex 
is touched in a sensitive spot. Thus, Freud 
speaks of a "profession complex," which tends 
to make men a little jealous of colleagues who 



THE MOTIVATION OF HUMAN LIFE 51 

outstrip them in their profession. There. is a 
feeling of pride and approval associated with the 
"profession complex" unless something occurs 
to arouse resentment. The complex-feelings 
may be exceedingly pleasant but abnormal; they 
may be both pleasant and normal. Dr. I. H. 
Coriat (Abnormal Psychology, page 36) states, 
"All complexes are not abnormal ... for the 
formation of normal complexes forms the basis 
of all our educational processes. Habits and 
highly skilled movements are complexes which 
are the result of frequent repetition." 

These complexes, then, affect and determine 
a man's philosophy of life, his conduct, and his 
religious views. Our interest in the complex for 
the moment lies in its influence upon the reli- 
gious life. The (Edipus-complex, which I have 
described at some length in a previous chapter, 
and which the reader may study at his leisure 
in any of the Freudian literature (Freud's In- 
terpretation of Dreams, page 222; Coriat: 
What is Psycho-analysis? page 43; Adler: The 
CEdipus Complex in the Psychoneuroses; Lay: 
Man's Unconscious Conflict, pages 18—37), * s 
the most common of all complexes and must 
bear the blame for most of the neuroses. For 
one reason or another, hatred and fear of the 
father are aroused in the plastic child-mind. 
This hatred becomes an obsession, to speak in 
popular terms, but is repressed into the Uncon- 
scious where it is the nucleus of a vicious com- 



52 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

plex. As God is the universal Father of man- 
kind, this hatred of the human father, or of the 
father-image as certain later disciples of Freud 
prefer to term it, is transferred to the Deity, and 
religious doubt, agnosticism, or even atheism is 
engendered in the sufferer's mind. A deeply- 
religious man who suffered from the (Edipus- 
complex never addressed the Deity in his 
prayers in terms of fatherhood, nor could he 
bear to think of God in that capacity. He ad- 
dressed Him as "Great spirit, in whom our lives 
inhere," "Creator of all things," "Thou who 
dost rule the universe," and like expressions. 
Not until his complex was broken up through 
psycho-analytic treatment could he bring him- 
self without repugnance to address the Deity 
as "Our Heavenly Father," the term most fre- 
quently used in prayer and most satisfying to 
the majority of persons. His complex had en- 
gendered strong doubts as to the existence of a 
Deity, the universal Father of mankind. He 
felt that some evil force must rule the universe. 
These doubts were happily resolved after the 
power of the complex was destroyed. 

A woman whose life had been made unhappy 
through the actions of a dissolute father, and 
who thus became the victim of an inverted 
(Edipus-complex, which caused her to hate the 
name of her father and recall him after his death 
only with tears and anguish, was the victim of 
the "border land state" in which she saw all the 



THE MOTIVATION OF HUMAN LIFE 53 

world as a world of shadows. Her father had 
taken her as a very young child into a desolate 
place, and there, in the gathering twilight, made 
believe that he had deserted her, hence the bor- 
der land state in which she relived the little trag- 
edy. She not only hated her father, but the 
whole world seemed unreal, and she not only 
questioned its reality, but also the goodness of 
the God who created such a world. She doubted 
whether such a God did indeed exist. She re- 
iterated again and again the question, "If a 
good God rules the universe, why does He allow 
evil to exist? Why do the good suffer and the 
evil prosper?" The tendency here was of course 
to give moral counsel. This was my method of 
dealing with such a case before learning of the 
psycho-analytic procedure. This was of course 
of no avail, as she suffered from a heavy neu- 
rosis. It was pointed out to her that the ques- 
tions she asked are as old as Job and are 
aroused invariably by the same train of cir- 
cumstances: circumstances that make the vic- 
tim feel reality is too harsh to bear. From this 
reality the poor victim flees to the shelter of a 
neurosis. It is as if the psyche said: "Here is 
this mundane world; all is awry in it; the good 
suffer and the evil prosper; it must be unreal; 
there can be no good God who has created it; 
it must be but the figment of imagination." 
Hence the "border land state." The individual 
refuses to see the world as real. Moreover, he 



54 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

objectifies and magnifies his own pain. What 
his Unconscious really means by such a diatribe 
is not that he sees a universe full of pain, but 
that he suffers in his own life. He expresses his 
own anguish in conventional, altruistic terms, 
but he really is referring to his own anguish; a 
useful hint for the religious counsellor. But of 
methods of treatment for such cases we shall 
speak later. Just now we are interested in the 
cause of the condition. 

Most people would consider that the origin of 
these doubts of the beneficence of the force that 
rules the universe, these eternal questionings, 
these despondencies, is to be found in present 
troubles and afflictions, that the burden of sor- 
row is too great for the mind to bear. This is 
not at all correct. In all my experience as a 
clergyman — familiar with all the emotions 
aroused by death and separation, loss of friends, 
poverty, fatal disease, and death in its most 
awful forms — I have never found a normal 
person who was driven to religious doubt by 
present difficulties nor to despair and longing 
for death. The normal mind does not react in 
that way; it recognizes that these things are a 
part of the natural order and that we must bear 
them with equanimity. 

Why, then, do others despair and throw down 
the burden of life? The explanation is as fol- 
lows: They are the victims of some vicious com- 
plex. A complex is deeply submerged in the 



THE MOTIVATION OF HUMAN LIFE 55 

Unconscious. If of an unpleasant nature, it is 
the more deeply submerged. The unpleasant 
memories that gather about it are not destroyed; 
they are repressed, submerged, and emerge into 
consciousness, as we have seen previously, only 
as painful emotions. Such a complex depresses 
the whole tone of life, it represses the victim's 
energy and depresses him emotionally. It 
matters not what his outward circumstances 
may be, they may be good or bad, happy or un- 
happy, he is constantly conscious of a "dull 
ache," a hidden anguish, that colors all of life. 
This complex creates a great body of "free, 
floating anxiety." That is to say, its original 
cause is forgotten, but the anxiety remains. 
The cause of this anxiety is not evident to 
waking consciousness, for it is deeply sub- 
merged in the hidden recesses of the personality. 
It makes its presence known in dreams, phobias 
(which are anxiety states), reveries or senseless 
"worries," and a general depression of the per- 
sonality which may even result in real physical, 
functional disturbance. To every little pin- 
prick of fortune, every slight to the personality, 
every affliction be it light or heavy, every phys- 
ical ailment be it great or small, this free float- 
ing anxiety attaches itself. The real trouble may 
depress the individual, but it is never unbear- 
able; add to this the free floating anxiety of the 
complex, the depression due to his inner conflict, 
and he has a load greater than he can bear. 



56 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

To the neurotic every mole-hill is a mountain; 
every friend may be an enemy in disguise, for he 
will bear some feature that resembles the hated 
object of the neurotic's complex; every altru- 
istic motive is to be questioned. It is as if a 
man, like the minister in Hawthorne's tale, were 
to assume a dark veil. Every little gray tinge 
of life, viewed through this disfiguring veil, 
would become deepest black; every gray cloud 
that covered the sun would bring night. No sun 
shines, no birds sing, there is no joy nor beauty 
anywhere for the victim of such a complex. 
Life is indeed not worth living, and the unfor- 
tunate longs for death. If we search for the 
efficient cause of such a state, we find it to be 
some infantile fixation. 

Byron was the victim of such a neurosis, due 
doubtless to his club-foot and his hatred of his 
mother, which seems to have been more or less 
justified. For his physical disability he compen- 
sated in the development of poetic craftsman- 
ship ; for the evil complex he sought to compen- 
sate in Don Juanism. He was constantly, as is 
the way of neurotics, exhibiting his broken 
heart to the world at large. As Matthew Ar- 
nold unfeelingly said, "He dragged the pageant 
of his broken heart across half Europe." Heine 
concealed his wretchedness (at the same time 
compensating for it) by bitter satire, the sting 
of which is felt in all his prose and verse. Some 
authors have made capital of their neuroses. 



THE MOTIVATION OF HUMAN LIFE 57 

Poe has described anxiety states "due to neu- 
roses" in his romantic tales. (See Poe's Pit 
and Pendulum, Fall of the House of Usher, and 
Premature Burial, a vivid tale of claustropho- 
bia.) 

A neurosis often leads to an intense longing 
for death, which does not mean annihilation for 
the neurotic, since the Unconscious cannot con- 
ceive of itself as annihilated, but a longing for 
the peace and quiet of the grave. (This longing 
may even be a disguised rebirth-wish. Jung 
states that the interpretation of symbols in 
dream analysis depends upon the age of the 
dreamer: if young, it may be a rebirth-wish, if 
old, a death-wish.) For the despondent neu- 
rotic, all mental paths lead to the one end: 
death. One of the most interesting illustrations 
of the constant recurrence of the death-wish is 
found in that ancient philosophic poem, the 
Book of Job. Job constantly cries out that he 
longs for death. To be sure he has just cause 
in that his troubles are greater than he can bear, 
but his emotions are not to be attributed to Job, 
but to the neurotic author of the document. The 
Prologue in heaven, represents in reality not a 
dialogue between an anthropomorphic God and 
a personal Devil, but the conflict of a neurotic 
suffering from repression. The afflictions of 
Job serve to bring out his neurotic conflict, they 
are the instigators. The three friends, who give 
him such worldly-wise counsel are really the 



58 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

voices of his own consciousness, or rather the 
voices in the soul of the author. " Wherefore," 
cries Job, "is light given to him that is in misery, 
and life to the bitter in soul: which long for 
death, but it cometh not; and dig for it more 
than for hid treasures; which rejoice exceed- 
ingly and are glad when they can find the 
grave?" (3:20-22). Eliphaz the Temanite, the 
first of the three false comforters is the voice of 
self-reproach, which is the basis of the "convic- 
tion of sin." He seeks to prove by citing an hal- 
lucination of his own (4:12—21) how suffering 
is invariably the result of personal wrong-doing; 
Job must have been guilty of some mortal sin, 
else he would not suffer. He is the voice of 
negation. "Call now; is there any that will 
answer thee?" Job, that is the voice of con- 
scious rectitude, replies that he knows of no such 
wrong-doing. But he is willing to be shown 
wherein he has erred. "Cause me to understand 
wherein I have erred." Bildad the Shuhite now 
reinforces the counsel of Eliphaz and reiterates 
that "God will not cast away the perfect man." 
Both of these would strengthen Job's self-re- 
proach and increase his suffering. But Job 
makes the logical answer that no one can be ac- 
counted just in the sight of God — why does he 
suffer more than others? At any rate he is 
willing to rest his case with God, although it 
seems to him that God does not invariably re- 
ward well-doing with prosperity and evil with 



THE MOTIVATION OF HUMAN LIFE 59 

misery. His better self, his consciousness, tells 
him that he has done no wrong more than other 
men who prosper. Why should he yield to these 
self-reproaches? He protests against God's 
severity and wishes that he had never been born. 
Then speaks Zophar the Naamathite and re- 
proaches Job for his arrogance and impiety. 
And thus the dialogue proceeds; first the voice 
of self-reproach telling Job that he has sinned; 
then the voice of his better self which replies 
that he has not sinned. Then speaks the youth- 
ful Elihu, who has heretofore held his peace, 
and upholds his friends' views. Then Jahveh 
himself speaks and reproves Job's importunity. 
Before the divine voice, Job is silenced. He is 
conscious of his ignorance of creation and the 
ways of God. Then he is restored to health and 
prosperity. That is to say, he yields, after the 
struggle and the upheaval of emotions, to the 
voice of his better self, telling him that all is 
well. The conflict is resolved by the abreaction 
or giving up of painful emotions. Job gives up 
his secret anguish; he has poured it out with its 
affect or emotional content, he has transferred 
the burden to God on whom he has rested his 
case. And he is restored to mental health. 
Without doing violence to the poem, we may 
state this conclusion. Job is a neurotic sufferer, 
tossed this way and that by his internal con- 
flict; he is pulled now this way, now that. 
Finally, he throws off the painful emotion that 



60 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

is blasting his life, lays his insufferable burden 
upon Jahveh, his dissociated personality is co- 
ordinated, and he is a whole man. This is doubt- 
less the mechanism by which the author of the 
book, through writing his doubts and expressing 
his suffering in cosmic terms, abreacted his own 
painful emotions, transferred them to the Deity, 
and so found peace. The book is an allegory of 
the mental sufferings of every neurotic individ- 
ual. It really represents a sort of psycho-an- 
alytic treatment. 

In the Book of Ecclesiastes, whose author 
announces himself simply as "Koheleth," or 
"the Preacher," if we eliminate the emendations 
of a later hand, we have the expression of a 
neurotic who is not healed of his mental dis- 
order. He is obviously suffering from a violent 
repression. As is the way with neurotics, he 
objectifies his neurosis and the consequent re- 
pression, projects it upon the Cosmos, makes it 
cosmic rather than personal. He has a feeling 
of inferiority, of incapacity, that his efforts ac- 
complish nothing and his plaint is, "What is the 
use of striving? One arrives nowhere." He 
states the conclusions to which his observation 
and experience have brought him in two sen- 
tences: "All is vanity. What profit hath a man 
of all his labour wherein he laboureth under the 
sun?" After considering all the fields of human 
activity and experiencing all life's varied pleas- 
ures; after a consideration of the seasons for 



THE MOTIVATION OF HUMAN LIFE 6l 

every activity and deciding that man cannot be 
sure that he finds the right season for such ac- 
tivity; he decides that it is all of no use. When 
we come to the passage where he declares that 
woman is one of the chief foes to human happi- 
ness — " whoso please th God shall escape from 
her; but the sinner shall be taken by her" 
(7:23-29) — we begin to get light on the sub- 
ject. He is obviously suffering from the (Edi- 
pus-complex. When he goes further and in- 
culcates prudent demeanor towards kings and 
others in authority (8:5—8) we are confirmed 
in our surmise, for we see that in kings and other 
persons in .authority he finds substitutes for the 
father whom he hates and fears. He is homo- 
erotic; he projects the father-image upon per- 
sons in authority ; he is a sufferer from the com- 
mon CEdipus-complex. Canon Driver {Litera- 
ture of the Old Testament) states that the book 
is without religious enthusiasm. "He recounts, 
and as he recounts, he generalizes, the disap- 
pointments which had been his own lot in life. 
He surveys the life of other men; but he can 
discover no enthusiasm, no energy, no faculty 
of grave and serious endeavor." Was ever 
clearer picture given of a serious neurosis that 
colored all of life? In succeeding chapters we 
shall review cases in real life which exactly 
parallel the incapacity, the listlessness, the pes- 
simism, the misogyny, the deep depression of 
Koheleth. 



62 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

We have seen how these two authors (Job 
and Ecclesiastes) plainly disclose their own 
complexes in their neurotic questionings of life. 
In Job's interviews with his friends is sufficiently 
demonstrated the futility of wise moral counsel 
in the treatment of such disorders. 

Religious counsels may for a brief space quiet 
the throbbing fears and raise the fallen hopes of 
the neurotic. But the good is only temporary 
when applied in the wrong way and at the wrong 
season. Religion may, and often does, in its 
proper and intelligent application relieve or even 
cure such cases, but it must be applied with in- 
telligent care and full knowledge of the nature 
of the psychic illness. Pfister declares that in 
his early applications of the psycho-analytic 
treatment he sometimes failed because he began 
giving religious counsel too early. Hypnosis, 
and other methods of suggestive treatment, as 
a rule give but temporary relief as they do not 
reach the seat of the trouble and add but an- 
other resistance to a disordered mind that al- 
ready suffers from too many. Far from resolv- 
ing the conflict, they oppose external conflict to 
internal conflict and the last state of that man 
may be worse than the first. At most, sugges- 
tive treatment gives but a temporary peace of 
mind. 

This chapter is, however, not specifically on 
methods of cure, but is an inquiry into the mo- 
tivation of human life. We have seen in Chap- 



THE MOTIVATION OF HUMAN LIFE 63 

ter II how the Unconscious determines our re- 
actions to external stimuli, how the complex 
rules human life, and how our whole philo- 
sophical and religious outlook as well as the lines 
of our every-day conduct is determined by op- 
erations of the Unconscious. It remains to see 
how dreams indicate the complex and reveal 
motives. 

The Dream as Indicator of Motivation 

The world of dreams seems to be a world of 
strange, disordered fancies, a region of phan- 
tasmagoria, of fantastic imagery, which gro- 
tesquely imitates the world of waking life but to 
distort it and confound the mind. Weird figures, 
neither human nor animal, perform unintel- 
ligible acts; strange landscapes meet the eye; 
we ourselves are transformed into unnatural 
beings with supernatural powers. We fly 
hither and yon without effort; we are indoors, 
out-of-doors and know not how we arrived. In 
a twinkling, "the cloud-capp'd towers, the gor- 
geous palaces . . . dissolve," leaving "not a 
rack behind," and we emerge into the conscious- 
ness of the waking world, where we slowly 
gather our faculties together and become our 
normal selves. 

It is not at all strange that the primitive mind 
attributes the dream to some supernatural 
agency; nor is it a matter for surprise that the 



64 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

normal mind attaches no value to the dream and 
regards it merely as a series of disjointed fancies 
without meaning. In these matter-of-fact times, 
we have learned to distrust him who claims to 
interpret dreams, classing him with the witch- 
doctor and the astrologer who for a considera- 
tion will cast your horoscope and foretell your 
future. 

Nevertheless, the dream is a product of some 
mental process; it must have some mechanism 
behind it; it must therefore in some sense or 
other have a meaning for us, inasmuch as it 
indicates psychic activity of some nature. 
Many persons will declare that the dream is 
merely the remnant of the day's psychic activ- 
ities expressed in fragmentary fashion, it is but 
the left-over images of the day's thinking un- 
controlled by waking intelligence. 

The dream is in reality far more significant 
than that. Freud has proved definitely that 
every dream has significance for the individual's 
psychic life. A certain type of dream indicates 
a certain state of mind. The dream is a wish- 
fulfilment, either in literal or symbolized form. 
Children, in whom the Conscious is not clearly 
differentiated from the Unconscious, will dream 
the literal fulfilment of their desires. The for- 
bidden excursion, or the forbidden viand, will 
make its appearance in childish dreams. With 
the adult, these take on a symbolized form, so 
highly symbolized that they are difficult or even 



THE MOTIVATION OF HUMAN LIFE 65 

impossible to interpret. By an elaborate mech- 
anism, which involves displacement, ambiva- 
lence, and other distortions and elaborations of 
the dream-work, the dream arrives at its goal, 
which is the satisfaction of desire. 

A friend who was forced to leave his abode 
and hunt another relates the following dream: 
He found himself in a large building, standing 
on the edge of a high platform. Some one said 
that the elevator would be down soon. From 
somewhere up above a small car descended, 
shaped like a small house, painted white and 
suspended by a cable which seemed to be com- 
posed of strands of gold. It swung out some 
distance from the platform on which he stood. 
He put out one foot tentatively to step into the 
car but drew back as the distance was too great. 
A stout, fashionably dressed man appeared, 
pushed him aside, entered the car and descended, 
leaving the dreamer there isolated. 

Now it happened that the wife of the dreamer 
had been house-hunting on the day previous to 
the night of the dream, and had come home and 
reported that she had found a small house, 
painted white, in a fashionable section of the 
town, some distance away. My friend had 
thought: "We cannot afford a house in that 
section with our limited income; its upkeep 
would cost a great deal, the rent would be high; 
besides, it is too far from my place of business. 
Some more opulent person had better take it." 



66 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

i 

Note how aptly the dream illustrates this 
frame of mind. The car in the dream, in the 
form of a "little, white house," is suspended by 
a gold cable by which it is "kept up." The car 
appears from above; the rent is "too high" for 
the man's means. The house is difficult of ac- 
cess, being at some distance from the center of 
the town; the car in the dream is "hard to 
reach," so hard that the dreamer gives up the 
attempt, as he would like to give up the house. 
"Some more opulent person had better take it." 
The stout man appears, pushes the dreamer aside 
and steps into the white car. He goes down, 
which probably means that the dreamer wishes 
the disagreeable opulent person who pushes him 
aside and takes the house may "go down" finan- 
cially. 

Many slurs have been cast upon the Freud- 
ian psychology, and its detractors, who for the 
most part have never disinterestedly examined 
it, declare that the dream-interpretations are 
fantastic, absurd, and arbitrary, that a highly 
suggestible neurotic may be led to confess any- 
thing that the analyst suggests, and that the 
symbolism of the dream is so manipulated and 
distorted in the interpretation that the analyst 
makes it mean whatever he will. To take a 
single instance, the statement that towers in 
the landscapes of dreams are often phallic sym- 
bols has been ridiculed. What, then, will the 
sceptic do with the following brief poem, "The 



THE MOTIVATION OF HUMAN LIFE 67 

Maiden's Dream," an old Greek folk-song, 
translated by Rose Kerr, and reprinted in the 
Literary Digest, July 5, 19 19: 

"Last night there came to me asleep 
A breath from the land of dreams: 

Within a garden walled and deep 
I saw two flowing streams 

And a tower of gold and ivory, 
Mother, canst read my dreams?" 

"Thou art the garden, daughter mine; 

The tower is thy grave; 
The streams of water flowing free 
Are the tears that I shall shed for thee, 

For love is vain to save." 

"O Mother mine, nay, do not weep; 

Not skilled art thou in dreams. 

Our dwelling is the garden deep, 

My children the two streams, 
And the fair tower is the husband strong 
In whose arms I shall dream no dreams." 

Every person who is familiar with Freiuf s 
Interpretation of Dreams will recognize this as 
a characteristic dream of a young girl in love, 
also the true and characteristic interpretation 
of the dream given by the young girl; he will 
likewise see the significance of the last line, "In 
whose arms I shall dream no dreams." 

We have excellent proof that the dream oc- 
cupies an incredibly short time. The images 
and events of the dream follow one another with 
extraordinary swiftness, like the changing views 
of the cinematograph when the operator speeds 



68 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

the machine. The dream may be said to be a 
series of swift impressions, usually visual, for 
sounds are rarely heard in dreams. Some 
dreams have auditory impressions, due to some 
external stimulus. Thus I dreamed that the 
telephone rang, that I rose, dressed, break- 
fasted, took the train into the city, went through 
the day's work, returned, supped, and again 
heard the telephone bell. At that point I woke, 
found that it was morning and that my alarm 
clock was ringing. I rose, stopped the alarm, 
and wound it. To my surprise, that part of 
the clock's mechanism was not perceptibly 
run down. This could only mean that the 
dream had occurred within the barest fraction 
of a minute, perhaps but a second or two. The 
dream illustrates the incredible swiftness of 
changing impressions of which only dreams are 
capable ; and the wish-fulfilment, for by dream- 
ing that the day's duties were done, I was 
enabled to snatch a few moments more of sleep. 
Apparently consciousness moves at a swifter 
tempo in dreams than in waking life. At first 
glance, it seems that although bodily functions, 
breathing, the pulse, digestion, and the like, 
slow down during sleep, consciousness proceeds 
at a swifter pace. It is possible that judgment, 
the necessity for ordered thinking, inhibits the 
swift flow of impressions during waking hours 
and that these impressions, freed from such 
inhibiting influence, crowd faster during sleep; 



THE MOTIVATION OF HUMAN LIFE 69 

that during sleep we no longer accommodate our 
mental pace to the exigencies of ordered se- 
quence ; and that the effect of longer duration in 
the dream is due to this increased tempo. It 
seems far more likely, however, that this swifter 
pace is only apparent, not real; that during 
waking life the stream of impressions flows quite 
as swiftly, if left to itself, as in the dream, and 
that these impressions are quite as inchoate and 
disjointed, but we thrust those aside which have 
nothing to do with the trend of thought we are 
at the moment pursuing; and that we con- 
sciously and voluntarily confine our attention 
to certain impressions by a selective process 
which disregards all impressions save those that 
bear upon that given trend of thought, and 
consciously thrust aside those which have naught 
to do with that particular sequence. Never- 
theless, though they may seem to have no 
effect upon our waking life, these disregarded 
impressions doubtless do impinge upon the mar- 
gin of consciousness, whence they find their way 
into the Unconscious to lie buried there until 
the proper stimulus brings them to light. When 
for any reason the censor which guards our 
waking life is off duty, these impressions come 
thronging in a whirling, kaleidoscopic proces- 
sion, they rise up and possess us. In dreams 
and delirium, there is nothing to inhibit the 
swift flow of images, and an impression of longer 
duration is the immediate result. 



70 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

We say that we " reduce" our thoughts to an 
ordered sequence, and the term "reduce" seems 
here more apt than we know, since it is mani- 
festly by reduction and selection that we attain 
ordered thought and make intellectual effort 
effectual. Bergson has pointed this out in his 
Time and Free Will. Barrett Wendell states 
that in planning a piece of intellectual work, we 
'arrive at coherence and unity by such a process 
of elimination. 

Doubtless, our time-sense, instead of being 
something a priori, as Kant claims, is the result 
of education and experience, and time itself but 
a convenience for the ordered life. Could the 
movement of consciousness be sufficiently 
speeded up, we might live a lifetime in a mo- 
ment. (Drowning persons have this impres- 
sion.) It is thus that "fifty years of Europe" 
are worth a "cycle in Cathay." It is the quick- 
ened consciousness of highly civilized life. The 
complex will invariably quicken the speed of 
impressions which in any way touch it. Thus, 
for the trained musician, there is no perceptible 
lapse of time between his reading of the notes, 
noting key and rhythm meanwhile, the trans- 
mission of this impression to consciousness, the 
transmission to trained fingers, and the motility 
which results in the execution of the composi- 
tion. This is due to his habit-complex. 

Reverse this quickening process, and as Berg- 
son states {Time and Free Will, page 194 f.), 



THE MOTIVATION OF HUMAN LIFE 71 

we might "take in the whole path of a heavenly 
body in a single perception." In one of Long- 
fellow's Tales of a Wayside Inn, a good monk 
ponders the words, "a thousand years are but 
as a day in thy sight." He is suddenly trans- 
lated to the celestial world, where he seems to 
remain for but an instant; when he returns to 
earth, he finds that the world has progressed 
through a hundred years of time. 

The dream is, then, a manifestation of our 
psychic life worthy of serious study, since, like 
symptomatic actions of every-day, it reveals our 
hidden motives, and reveals them even more 
clearly. The hidden anguish that we success- 
fully repress during waking hours now breaks 
forth, our inner life is revealed, and, when we 
come to analyze the dream, we find that it 
states in no uncertain terms what we should like 
to say in waking life, were the desires of the 
Unconscious not sharply repressed. Could we 
interpret all our dreams correctly, we should 
know our own innermost thoughts, desires, ap- 
petites, aptitudes, and capabilities. We should 
then go astray in our judgments far less fre- 
quently than we do when we disregard the point- 
ing finger of these psychic guide-posts. 

Suppose we do disregard these indicators of 
our motives, and mold our lives, as so many do, 
on the judgments of others, choosing our careers 
because some friend or relative advises us, sink- 
ing our own personality in that of some one 



72 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

else — in that case, we shall inevitably go astray, 
miss our destiny, awake to our mistake too late, 
and reap lasting unhappiness. Many a man 
or woman chooses a mate because of a re- 
semblance or fancied resemblance to some rela- 
tive. The individual who so chooses will look 
for qualities in the chosen mate similar to those 
of the beloved relative and be disappointed if 
these qualities do not appear. A man suffering 
from the (Edipus-complex will choose for his 
wife a woman who resembles his mother and will 
look for maternal qualities in his wife. This 
is of course wrong, and leads to unhappiness. 
If a man marries a wife a great deal older than 
he, it is almost invariably because he desires 
a mother-substitute. The secretary of an or- 
ganization which acts as an employment bureau 
for returned soldiers and sailors tells me that 
when a man comes to him and reports that he 
has made a hasty marriage that has turned out 
unhappily, he always asks the man if his wife 
is older than he. With sickening uniformity, 
these men reply that such is the case. 

Or if a man marries for money or because of 
friendly (?) advice from another, he will be 
unhappy. Fortunately, the mandates of the in- 
ner self in the normal man are likely to be too 
strong to be repressed and, as Bergson says, 
after all the advice of friends has been duly 
weighed and considered, the self suddenly 
bursts forth, breaks all fetters, and makes its 



THE MOTIVATION OF HUMAN LIFE 73 

own judgments in opposition to all the collec- 
tive wisdom of which it has been the beneficiary. 
This course is much more likely to result in last- 
ing happiness. * 

1 See Appendix for full discussion of dreams and dream 
mechanisms. 



IV. DETERMINISM AND FREE-WILL 

NO more bitter warfare has been waged 
over any philosophical issue than that 
waged over determinism versus free-will. Mod- 
ern man likes to feel that he can make free 
choice of action, that it lies within himself to 
choose his course and determine his own future. 
He desires to feel that his destiny is self-deter- 
mined. Primitive peoples, on the contrary, 
ignorant of the processes of natural law, observ- 
ant of natural phenomena which they are unable 
to explicate, bound by ignorance and supersti- 
tion, feel themselves at the mercy of mysterious 
supernatural forces, hence they incline to be 
fatalistic. Moderns of limited mental power, es- 
pecially if they are badly environed and feel 
unable to control or rise above their environ- 
ment, echo the fatalism of the primitive. A feel- 
ing of "What is the use of effort, since every- 
thing is predetermined?" pervades primitive 
thought. "It lies on the knees of the gods," said 
the ancients. "Kismet!" says the Arab, "all is 
ordered, let us bow to the will of Allah." The 
Arabs have an expression, which we may trans- 
literate "mecktoub," which means that a thing 
is so ordered by higher powers than we and 

74 



DETERMINISM AND FREE-WILL 75 

cannot be changed by human effort. Since it 
plays so large a part in the determination of a 
man's life-course, this burning question of 
whether all is pre-determined by forces outside 
ourselves or whether it is determined by our 
own volitions has been the paramount interest 
of religious and philosophic thought from re- 
motest antiquity down to the present. 

Archdeacon Paley claimed to make out a good 
case for determinism when he declared that the 
Almighty had created the universe according 
to a well-conceived plan, designed and made it 
in the beginning, as the watch-maker designs 
and makes the watch; that He set its many 
wheels in motion and they have run ever since 
according to the primal plan. Leibnitz stood 
out for the pre-determined harmony of the uni- 
verse. These views still find wide acceptance. 

These easy solutions of the problem miss the 
practical side of the matter (they are, in reality, 
matters of dialectic rather than of human ac- 
tion) since they fail to show that man must at 
all events act as if he were free, since other- 
wise the world would cease to progress and lapse 
back into chaos. A good deal of the philosophic 
pronouncement on the subject is pure dialectic, 
the product of the study, not the garnered ex- 
perience of real life and actual contact. Berg- 
son, in his Creative Evolution, shows how our 
view of the world as designed order or chaotic 
discord, is a matter of intellectual concept. 



76 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

From observation, we gain certain intellectual 
concepts of the universe. These concepts we 
analyze and classify. What we classify is not 
objective reality, but a subjective thing, these 
self -evolved intellectual concepts. We create 
categories, analyze our concepts of the universe 
under these categories, then proceed to synthe- 
size what we have already created and analyzed. 
As an intellectual exercise this may be good, but 
we must recognize it for what it is. From this 
point of view, there is no evidence of conscious 
design in natural processes, says Bergson, but 
there is evidence of a life-force, an elan vital, 
which pushes out in all directions. Thwarted 
in certain directions by insuperable obstacles, 
it pushes through those channels which are left 
open to it, and thus types are created and evolu- 
tion proceeds. 

William James (Varieties, page 438, note) 
states: "When one views the world with no defi- 
nite theological bias one way or the other, one 
sees that order and disorder, as we now recog- 
nize them, are purely human inventions. We 
are interested in certain types of arrangement, 
useful, aesthetic, or moral — so interested that 
whenever we find them realized, the fact em- 
phatically rivets our attention. The result is 
that we work over the contents of the world 
selectively. . . . Our dealings with Nature 
are just like this. . . . We count and name 
whatever lies upon the special lines we trace, 



DETERMINISM AND FREE-WILL 77 

whilst the other things and the untraced lines 
are neither named nor counted.' ' 

The devout mind may be repelled by such 
ratiocination, for to question that the universe 
is controlled through pre-determined design may 
smack to some of atheism, it may seem to ques- 
tion God's over-ruling providence. But is this 
necessarily so? May it not be possible that the 
Almighty works not by means of fundamental 
plans but through evolutionary methods, or that 
a fundamental plan is being worked out through 
evolutionary methods? If philosophy fails to 
find evidence of First Cause, that does not neces- 
sarily imply that we are ruled by blind force. 
The Creator may work by other methods and 
through other means. 

It is evident that we suffer from over-intel- 
lectualization. We are perhaps too sophisti- 
cated; we are over-anxious to find a causal 
thread running through all things; we divide, 
classify, analyze, and synthesize arbitrarily for 
our own self-satisfaction, in order that life may 
seem to be a nicely-rounded whole; we seek 
to smooth life up like a well-made bed, we en- 
close its phenomena in a well-rounded covering 
like the crust of the apple-dumpling and then, 
like a certain English king, we express wonder 
as to how the apples got inside! Through a 
singular blindness, we refuse to accept life's 
discontinuities or think of it as fragmentary. 

Listen to the popular lecturer who addresses 



78 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

an audience on some historical movement; note 
how he treats of this phase and that phase, this 
character and that, then, finally, draws his 
threads together, establishes definite relation- 
ships and makes false continuities where none 
really exist. By such false dialectics we may 
relate anything in the universe to anything else, 
past, present, or to come, and we often do. The 
truth is, the mind loves ordered sequence, con- 
tinuity of thought, must have it in fact, though 
the sequence be false, for it is through this 
ordered sequence, this continuity, this classifi- 
cation, this analysis and synthesis, this cate- 
gorizing, that we build our intellectual struc- 
tures. We seek unity and design and we insist 
upon having them at any cost. We formulate 
a theory (and the Freudians are by no means 
free from this fault) then we refer all the events 
and phenomena of life to that theory; it be- 
comes a Procrustian bed which all things must 
fit. What we have to learn is that this unity 
and design are modes of thought, not objective 
realities, and that they depend wholly upon a 
point of view. Were we to realize this, we 
should spare ourselves much pains and futile 
struggle trying to reconcile irreconcilable differ- 
ences perceived in the external world, also much 
useless argument, pro and contra. 

If we accepted this view of all life as ordered 
sequence, we should be driven to extreme de- 
terminism. Recognized as a matter of dialec- 



DETERMINISM AND FREE-WILL 79 

tic, we may discard this view and regard free- 
will as operative in human life. The unbiased 
mind, for instance, can see no causal thread 
running through history in the sense in which 
Hegel saw it, with his artificial thesis, antithesis, 
and synthesis. In view of the late war, we 
can scarcely claim that the human race moves 
forward according to the primal plan of some 
celestial being, nor again as if pushed forward 
by some blind force. What we witness is the 
race moving onward through a series of cyclic 
changes in which it takes on something new 
here and there, experiments, selects, rejects, and 
progresses by a determinism which is the re- 
sult of experience and is therefore self-determi- 
nation. We may say, then, that there is a sort 
of determinism in human life, there is a series of 
events which the superficial observer might 
judge to spring from primal design, but which is 
really the result of racial experimentation, the 
attempt at self-determination. 

Let us bring the matter down to concrete 
cases and the acts of everyday life and see just 
how our lives are determined. As we have seen 
in the chapter on the "Motivation of Human 
Life," no human action, choice, or judgment 
is from caprice. It is determined by the action 
of the Unconscious when it is not consciously 
willed. Even in that case, the Unconscious 
plays a large part in the choice or judgment. 
Take the matter of forgetting, for instance. 



80 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

It always has a motive. Who has not had the 
experience of forgetting a proper name? This 
is due, says Coriat, to a dissociation which leads 
to the forgetting of the name because it has 
painful associations. There is thus an uncon- 
scious but purposeful motive in the forgetting. 
He cites the case of an individual (Abnormal 
Psychology, Second Edition, p. 23) who could 
not recall the name of the Swiss neurologist 
Veraguth for some hours. By the free-associa- 
tion method (that is, obtaining from the sub- 
ject all the free associations with the word) the 
following sequence was obtained: "Veraguth — 
Verabad-Bad (the German for bath) — Bath — 
water — mineral water." The story came out 
that the previous summer "the subject was sud- 
denly taken ill while in Switzerland with a dis- 
order which required the use of a certain mineral 
water and thus was unable to travel as had been 
planned. The association of the disagreeable 
experience in Switzerland was the inhibiting 
force which prevented the recall of the name." 

These little errors of everyday life are de- 
termined by complexes which inhere in the Un- 
conscious and determine our course of action. 
In this category come the forgetting of names, 
mistakes in speech (see the story of Roosevelt 
related in the Appendix, page 238), mis- 
takes in reading, as when we see a familiar 
word in place of the unfamiliar one really 
printed, mistakes in writing (as when a cotton- 



DETERMINISM AND FREE-WILL 8l 

planter attributed his mental troubles to worry 
over the outcome of his crop and said his trouble 
was due to a "frigid wife," whereas he meant 
to write a "frigid wave," the former term being 
the correct one), x forgetting of impressions and 
resolutions (such as to write a letter to a person 
whom one dislikes, or to post it when written, 
or to enclose a check in a letter), erroneously 
carried-out actions as the well-known tendency 
of a lover who, on his way to business in an 
abstracted state, will go a long distance out of 
his way to pass his beloved's house. 

The so-called "Deja vu," or feeling of hav- 
ing seen a certain place or person or having been 
in an actual situation before one really has been 
there, is due to a similar mechanism of the Un- 
conscious. It is like Pfister's formula, "Now 
the situation is as it was before when such and 
such a thing happened." Thus a nurse, upon 
coming into a hospital for the first time, felt 
that she had been there before. It turned out 
upon examination that this feeling was due to 
a train of circumstances which had occurred in 
another hospital and she was reminded of these 
upon coming into the unfamiliar one. The new 
experience stirs an unconscious memory, hence 
the "Deja vu." Freud, in his Psychology of 
Everyday Life, page 320 ff., has explained the 
"Deja vu" at great length. 

Our choice of religious beliefs is similarly de- 

1 Freud: Psychopathology of Everyday Life, page 129. 



82 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

termined. We shall see in the chapter on "Mys- 
ticism," how men have been driven into the se- 
clusion of monasteries by severe neuroses and 
there have had certain experiences that we call 
mystic. Unconscious motives have driven men 
from one sect to another, in accordance with the 
repressed desires of the Unconscious. Pfister 
{Psychoanalytic Method, page 326 f.) speaks 
of the desires of neurotics to take refuge in 
strange and bizarre forms of religion, a symp- 
tom of unhealthy-mindedness. (We shall see 
more of this in the chapter on "The Occult in 
Modern Religious Systems.") When the neu- 
rosis is cured, the subject will give up the bizarre 
system and return to normal. 

In our discussion of this subject, we must 
take account of the fact that something of our 
remotest ancestors survives in each one of us; 
in both the group-life and the individual, the 
antiquity of the race is preserved in the Un- 
conscious. Those impulses and desires which 
were conscious in our savage forbears and are 
still conscious in young children, are submerged 
in the Unconscious in adult life, whence they 
reach out to influence our lives. This, while 
it may seem to be a sort of determinism, is in 
the strictest sense a kind of freedom of will; 
it signifies that the race by a definite choice of 
certain courses of action from time to time defi- 
nitely determines what sort of race it shall be; 
this is self-determination, therefore it is racial 



DETERMINISM AND FREE-WILL 83 

free-will. It is not, then, a matter of dialectic 
or speculation, but of direct human experience, 
immediate human contacts. 

When we consider how a percept-sequence 
results in motility, or, in plain words, how 
thought and feeling result finally in action, we 
see that every individual life is to a great degree 
self-determined. With the motivation that pro- 
ceeds from his own Unconscious in which in- 
heres much material bequeathed him by his 
primitive forbears, each individual sets out to 
erect the structure of his life and follow his own 
destiny. Were there no Unconscious to pre- 
serve memories and act as a repository of per- 
cepts until these percepts can result in motility, 
man's life would be a discontinuity, for each 
new state of consciousness would be sharply set 
off and differentiated from every preceding 
state; in that case, man would not be a person- 
ality, he would be a succession of discontinu- 
ous, independent states of consciousness, without 
memory; and having no accumulated experi- 
ence upon which to draw, he could make no 
progress. In that sense, his life may be said 
to be predetermined. But it is pure sophistry 
to call this "determinism." He still has the 
right of free choice. If we grow at all, it must 
be because of our reactions upon collective ex- 
periences and collective memories. How should 
we grow otherwise? And we grow even in our 
unconscious states. James stated that "we learn 
to swim in winter and to skate in summer." 



84 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

Freud has made it clear in the final chap- 
ters of his Interpretation of Dreams, how the 
"most complex mental operations are possible 
without the co-operation of consciousness." He 
declares that "unconscious wishes always re- 
main active. . . . They represent paths which 
are passable whenever a sum of excitement 
makes use of them." He demonstrates by the 
use of diagrams the mechanism by which a 
series of percepts finally results in motility. It 
is a complex mechanism and the process itself 
is complicated, but the gist of the matter is that 
percepts are acted upon by certain memory 
systems of the psychic apparatus, these memo- 
ries in turn modify the percepts in the Un- 
conscious, finally, the modified percepts emerge 
through the Foreconscious, which lies "between 
the realm of the Unconscious and that of con- 
sciousness and which contains the material of 
recent experience" (Coriat) — and finally these 
transformed percepts enter the Conscious as 
ideas and issue in action. This is an incuba- 
tion process which may take a long time ; it may 
be years; hence, our decisions may be deter- 
mined by complexes which had their beginning 
in earliest childhood. 

All our ideas are, as we have previously seen, 
tinged with the Unconscious. Every human 
act is determined by the action of the Uncon- 
scious upon percepts. Every object of the ex- 
ternal world, every thought brought to us from 



DETERMINISM AND FREE-WILL 85 

other minds, thus becomes assimilated and col- 
ored by our own personality. Thus we form 
what James terms the "value judgment." We 
evaluate and decide upon the utility of the ob- 
ject or the thought in the development of our 
own lives. We are like the good housewife 
who looks over a pile of garments and places 
certain of them in one pile for the rag-man, 
others in a pile to be mended and worn again. 
Thus, in a sense we make free choice of action, 
in a sense our actions are pre-determined, since 
they take on the color of the collective memories 
of the Unconscious and the Foreconscious. 

And thus no human act, however capricious 
it may seem, is without definite cause. We are 
incapable of caprice, in the strict sense of the 
word. We weigh values, though we may do 
it unconsciously, and we decide to seize upon 
that object, carry out that purpose, pursue that 
course of action, which will best serve our ends. 

The neurotic, victim of obsessions, phobias, 
compulsive thinking and action, cannot conceive 
of the world as being ordered otherwise than 
by some malign force or evil genius. He is 
not the master of his forces. His phobias force 
him to avoid certain places and certain persons. 
His malign complexes tend to color more and 
more the objects, the places, the people, and all 
the life about him, until his whole existence 
becomes darkened and he is incapable of volun- 
tary thought or action. Acts which are per- 



86 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

fectly easy for normal persons and which his 
friends know he can perfectly well perform, are 
made impossible by these evil complexes. If 
he keeps moving in this direction, his whole ex- 
istence will become determined thus, he will 
become incapable of any action, and will be- 
come an introverted or shut-in personality. 
Fortunately, most neuroses are not severe 
enough to result in such a catastrophe and 
modern psycho-therapeutics can break them up 
before they reach this final stage. (The Apos- 
tle Paul expresses his own aboulia in the words, 
"For the good that I would I do not; but the 
evil I would not, that I do.") Thus may be 
explained the apparent contrariety of neurotics. 
They do not do the simple, social thing, because 
they feel that they cannot. They must first 
be freed from the evil spell that binds them. 

The idle turning from one task to another as 
a relief from ennui, the feeling of "never-get- 
done," which obsesses some persons, may be 
regarded as such neurotic symptoms. The neu- 
rotic life is pre-determined by the sinister forces 
that rule that life; but the life of the individual 
freed from neurotic obsessions is indeed a life 
of free will and free choice. 



V. MYSTICISM AND NEUROTIC 
STATES 

FROM time to time in the world's history 
there have appeared persons who, in some 
chamber hidden away from the world, the clois- 
tered peace of some monastery, or some lonely 
mountain cavern, have had an immediate aware- 
ness of the presence of God. They have had 
this experience not through some logical process 
or intellectual method, though they have gone 
through a course of what might be termed spir- 
itual calisthenics, but through an emotional up- 
heaval. They have left the world behind to 
follow after righteousness, and the mystic ex- 
perience, so-called, is their reward. Those who 
have had such an experience have been called 
"mystics." We shall determine from the wit- 
ness of their own lips just what the conditions 
of this experience are; what the real content 
is, may well be left for the philosopher and the 
theologian. We are concerned with the mech- 
anism which produces the mystic experience. 
One word will express the condition of having 
such an experience; it is the word "repression." 
As we have seen, it is doubtful whether the 
normal person ever seeks voluntarily to escape 

87 



88 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

from reality and take refuge in a cloistered se- 
clusion or a fanciful world created by his imagi- 
nation. He may seek to change an uncongenial 
environment for one better suited to his nature 
and his needs; he may go apart from the world 
for a space to meditate upon some truth which 
occupies his mind, to co-ordinate his faculties 
and get a perspective upon life, to perform some 
piece of work, as the writing of a book or the 
invention of scientific apparatus, but his interest 
in the main will be in the great populous world 
of men, his temporary absence from that world 
will be for social ends, and he will return to it 
with gladness when his work is finished, even 
as a traveller returns from some distant shore — 
happy to be once more at home and among 
friends. So deep is the human need of friends 
and social contacts, that the normal man will 
give up life rather than face solitary confine- 
ment. The feeling that he is one with the group- 
life strengthens his arm and enables him to per- 
form heroic deeds of which by himself he is in- 
capable; his social contacts develop him and 
enrich his life. The deepest grief will therefore 
not suffice to drive the normal person from the 
world, nor the keenest disappointment shut him 
up within the phantasmal world of a diseased 
fancy. 

There must, then, be some neurotic taint as 
a condition of mysticism; some abnormal trait 
that drives the individual from the world. He 



MYSTICISM AND NEUROTIC STATES 89 

has suffered the "slings and arrows of outrageous 
fortune," but we must add to these a definite 
proclivity for the solitary life. His afflictions 
are not the efficient cause of his flight into se- 
clusion, they are but the instigating cause. He 
suffers from repression. 

Now it by no means follows that such reli- 
gious experiences are the result of perverted 
sexuality, though there may be abnormal sex 
features present. James states with good 
reason (Varieties, page n, note) that religion 
cannot be adequately interpreted as perverted 
sexuality. There is implication here that some 
one has advanced the theory that religion is 
based on sex-perversion. This theory, he says, 
"snuffs out Saint Theresa as an hysteric, Saint 
Francis of Assisi as an hereditary degenerate." 
It may be that some one has stated that religion 
is sex perversion ; but it is certainly no one of the 
Freudian school. In the first place, it must be 
noted that Freud uses the term "sex" in a much 
wider sense than is usual. It by no means im- 
plies "sensual" to say "sexual." But it is true 
that all our psychic life is in the broadest sense 
based on sex; our whole attitude toward life, our 
philosophy, our religious views are, as we have 
already seen, dependent in the last analysis upon 
sex. The man will not see the world with the 
same eyes as the woman, nor the child with the 
same eyes as the adult; there are profound 
psychic differences in their natures, due to char- 



90 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

acteristics which we may well call "secondary 
sex characteristics." So far as I am awarej no 
one would attempt to interpret all the phenom- 
ena of religious life as instances of sex-perver- 
sion, nor would any modern psychologist at- 
tribute Carlyle's "organ-tones of misery" (I 
quote once more from James) to a "gastro- 
duodenal catarrh." Such argument is puerile 
and biased in the extreme; it would seem to indi- 
cate that the man who argues thus is himself 
the victim of obsession. Nevertheless, religious 
types cannot be understood without reference to 
sex. 

Whereas no one in our day is inclined to at- 
tribute genius, religious, literary, or artistic, to 
degeneracy, we have explored the deeper re- 
cesses of human personality in a way and to an 
extent never before accomplished ; we are there- 
fore safe in saying, in the light of such expe- 
rience, that many religious phenomena are 
directly attributable to neuroses, and that 
repressed sex-instinct does play a prominent 
role in certain types of religious phenomena. 
Carlyle's "duodenal catarrh" may not suffice to 
explain his genius, but it does explain his pessi- 
mistic outlook on life, it gives his ideas color and 
very somber color at that. The genius of Poe 
is not attributable to the fact that he was neu- 
rotic; but his neurosis colors all his output. 
Tschaikowsky would doubtless have been as 
great a composer had his psychic life been nor- 



MYSTICISM AND NEUROTIC STATES 91 

mal, but it is doubtful whether he would have 
written the Symphonie Pathetique. So it must 
be with our inquiries in the religious field; we 
can interpret religious types and religious phe- 
nomena only through a correct interpretation 
and comprehension of their psychic background. 
Therefore, while the neurotic taint may not suf- 
fice to explain the entire content of religious 
experience, a neurosis will frequently be found 
to give direction to religious thought and de- 
termine the mode of religious life. 

It must be suspected in the case of every in- 
dividual who has been driven to the cloisters by 
the afflictions and difficulties that beset this life. 
From a thorough examination of mysticism and 
the lives of mystics, I am convinced that none is 
free from neurotic taint. 

The mystic, the ascetic, the religious recluse, 
is driven by his neurosis forth from the haunts 
of men, to live in his cell in some remote cloister, 
or his cave on some lonely mountain-side. The 
family history of the saint often reveals the na- 
ture of the neurosis. The (Edipus-complex may 
be cited in the case of many saints as the cause 
of their withdrawal from useful social life, to 
live the life of meditation and prayer and com- 
mune alone with the Deity. Other complexes 
have been quite as active in determining the 
nature of the individual's religious life, and have 
sent him away from social contacts to the life 
of the recluse. 



92 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

We have defined the mystic state as a state of 
immediate awareness of God. The mystic goes 
into seclusion, he meditates, fasts, and prays; 
finally, he arrives at a state of complete pas- 
sivity and receptivity, earth's harsh noises are all 
shut away, even voluntary thought is finally 
shut out, and into the receptive soul (in the 
language of mysticism) God pours his ineffable 
love, the whole being is illumined as though by 
a divine light, and the mystic is caught up into 
the heavens where he swoons in rapturous bliss 
at the very throne of God. The imagery is at 
times exceedingly anthropomorphic; the mystic 
is caught up in divine arms, as a child is caught 
up by its mother, and laid in blisful repose upon 
the bosom of God Himself. 

Hear the evidence of Jan Ruysbroek, a Do- 
minican mystic who takes his name from the 
small village on the Seine in which he was born 
about 1290: 

Then first, when we withdrew into the simplicitas of our 
heart, do we behold the immeasurable glory of God, and our 
intellect is as clear from all consideration of distinction and 
figurative apprehensions, as though we had never seen or heard 
of such things. Then the riches of God are open to us. Our 
spirit becomes desireless, as though there were nothing on earth 
or in heaven of which we stood in need. Then we are alone with 
God, God and we — nothing else. Then we rise above all mul- 
tiplicity and distinction into the simple nakedness of our essence, 
and in it become conscious of the infinite wisdom of the Divine 
Essence, whose inexhaustible depths are as a vast waste, into 
which no corporeal and no spiritual image can intrude. . . . 
Lost in the abyss of our eternal blessedness, we perceive no dis- 
tinction between ourselves and God. 



MYSTICISM AND NEUROTIC STATES 93 

Let us turn to the Swabian mystic, Henry 
Suso, another of the Dominicans, who belongs to 
the same period: 

I looked and behold the body about my heart was clear as 
crystal, and I saw the Eternal Wisdom calmly sitting in my 
heart in lovely wise: and, close by that form of beauty, my 
soul, leaning on God, embraced by His arms, pressed to His 
heart, full of heavenly longing, transported, intoxicated with 
love. 

The Eternal Wisdom speaks, and these are her 
words: 

I am the throne of joy, I am the crown of bliss. Mine eyes 
are so bright, my mouth so tender, my cheeks so rosy-red, and 
all my form so winning fair, that were a man to abide in a 
glowing furnace till the Last Day, it would be a little price for 
a moment's vision of my beauty. 

We need quote no further. The utterances of 
other mystics, Tauler, St. Catherine of Sienna, 
St. Theresa, parallel these sayings with even 
more erotic imagery and extravagance of 
language. 

It will be interesting to note the analogies 
between the visions of mysticism and the hallu- 
cinations of the neurotic. In the first place, the 
condition of the mystic experience is seclusion 
from the world, the abstracted state. The re- 
tirement of the mystic is in some respects sim- 
ilar to the "shut-in" personality that is sympto- 
matic of a severe neurosis. 

In the second place, the character of the vi- 
sions of the mystic is strikingly similar to certain 



94 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

neurotic and hysterical symptoms. We must 
feel that the mystic experience is definitely hys- 
terical in origin. Compare with the rhapsodic 
utterances of the mystics, this utterance of a 
woman who suffered from an anxiety-hysteria. 
" Suddenly, as I reclined in an easy chair by the 
window, looking out toward the setting sun, the 
very heavens opened; I could see the golden 
towers of the Eternal City, steps appeared and 
angels ascended and descended with palm 
branches in their hands." (Compare Jacob's 
dream, Genesis 28, which the subject had read.) 
"There was a blinding light and God Himself 
came forth out of the pearly gates and a bright 
ray of light entered my heart. My whole being 
was transfixed and transfused with Divine Love. 
I thrilled from head to foot, I could not move." 

This woman had suffered from repression of 
the normal sex instinct. Repressed in her natu- 
ral instincts, she was subject to these hysterical 
outbursts but ceased to have them when the hys- 
teria which caused them was cured. Seclusion 
and repression are the conditions of the mystic 
experience. 

We might compare the mystic experience to 
the effective abreaction of emotion in the psycho- 
analytic treatment. The individual is in a state 
of quiescence, receptivity. As the patient is 
placed in a reclining position in a semi-darkened 
room and told to relax, in order that in an ab- 
stracted state, he may view his own psychic proc- 



MYSTICISM AND NEUROTIC STATES 95 

esses, so the mystic "withdraws into the sim- 
plicitas of the heart." 

Then, when he is in this abstracted, receptive 
condition, all the memories, the imagery, the 
experience, the anguish of his inward conflict, 
which have been stored up in the Unconscious 
and violently repressed, issue forth with such 
strength that he is overwhelmed and speechless. 
His visions are colored by his thought and pre- 
vious reading, as the dream is colored by the 
experiences of the previous day. We cannot 
quite say that these celestial visions are the "de- 
lusions of grandeur" of the paranoiac, but they 
have at least a similar mechanism back of them: 
they are hallucinations due to the long repres- 
sion of sex-instinct of the ascetic, the nature of 
the mystic's preparatory fasting, meditation, 
and mode of thought, and to the receptive ab- 
stracted condition in which he places himself. 

"Our spirit becomes desireless, as though there 
were nothing on earth or in heaven of which 
we stood in need," says Ruysbroek. Certainly, 
for desire is gratified in the erotically-motivated 
heavenly vision, even as desire is gratified in 
highly symbolized dreams. "Lost in the abyss 
of our eternal blessedness, we perceive no dis- 
tinction between ourselves and God." In other 
words, the sea of the Unconscious, so much 
vaster in extent than the field of waking con- 
sciousness, rises up and engulfs the devotee. 
This abyss of which all mystics speak, "an abyss 



96 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

of undifferentiated being," in which all their 
being seems submerged, can be nothing more nor 
less than just this sea of the Unconscious; they 
have the feeling of being engulfed in it because 
all definite, directed thought is erased from the 
mind for the time, and consciousness seems to 
spread and diffuse itself through the universe. 
Patients going under the influence of an anaes- 
thetic have a similar feeling. With the mystic, 
of course, there is the strong influence of auto- 
suggestion to strengthen the impression, and 
affective thought to give it definite direction. 

That there is strong erotic feeling, not always 
sublimated or refined, beneath the symbolism of 
the mystic is evident from the rhapsodies of St. 
Theresa, St. Catherine, and the quotation from 
Suso which I have cited above. 

The desire-element with its fulfilment is so 
strongly evidenced in all recorded mystic ex- 
periences as to need no comment and no further 
proof. The mystic desires above all things to 
see God, to experience God, to be one with Him, 
and this very desire, working with tremendous 
potency upon unconscious elements in his per- 
sonality, brings at length the fulfilment he seeks. 
We have here a cumulative effect, a constant 
accretion, a cumulative surging up of desire 
within the Unconscious, accompanied by strong 
repression of the Conscious, until at length the 
welling flood bursts all bonds and breaks forth 
with violence in an hysterical outburst. 



MYSTICISM AND NEUROTIC STATES 97 

Let us consider the life of the mystic a little 
more specifically. The mediaeval monk, desirous 
of becoming one with God, deliberately cut him- 
self off from his fellows to live a definitely aso- 
cial life. It was a rude world in which he lived; 
fighting was a man's work in that world and 
the sensitive soul found little peace except in 
the monastery. So the monk retires to his clois- 
ter; he fasts, reducing his food to the very mini- 
mum that will sustain life ; he rises from his rude 
bed at all hours to pray upon the cold flag- 
stones of his cell; he flagellates himself until 
he faints from loss of blood; he wears a hair- 
shirt or even iron spikes beneath his habit; he 
undergoes all sorts of penance for sins real and 
imaginary. He thinks by this means to destroy 
all natural instinct, which is of the devil. But 
these instincts are not destroyed, they lead an 
unconscious autonomous life. This creates the 
ideal condition for the hysterical outburst. It 
inevitably comes; the floods dammed up for a 
long period break forth with violence. What 
wonder that the mystic feels an unwonted free- 
dom, an infinite happiness after this powerful 
affective abreaction, or that the feeling of exul- 
tation is succeeded by a feeling of perfect re- 
laxation, perfect peace. 

The mystic may feel that he has good reason 
violently to repress all desire and memory of 
his former life. He may have been like St. 
Francis of Assisi, a worldling immersed in the 



98 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

vanities of the world; or like St. Augustine, a 
rake whose life had been dissolute. In that case, 
repression will be all the stronger; he will seek 
to forget his evil life; his penance will be re- 
doubled, for there will be the element of remorse 
to contend with ; and the uprushing flood of emo- 
tion will be all the stronger. We may say that 
there has been in his life a dissociation, his life 
has been divided against itself. But with the up- 
welling floods of emotion the dissociated ele- 
ments become one with conscious elements, 
the dissociated personality is once more 
whole, and the mystic feels the sensation of 
mental and moral soundness. The uprush of 
emotion has acted as a mental catharsis, the 
mystic is once more in tune with God and the 
universe. 

Given the right conditions, it is likely that 
any one could have the "mystic experience. " 
There needs but the long-continued repression, 
the raising of powerful resistances, the conflict 
with its gathering strength, and there will in- 
evitably come the outburst of pent-up emotion. 
The form this outburst will take depends, as we 
have seen, upon individual predilection. 

Whether the mystic actually comes into con- 
tact with something Divine, I am not prepared 
to say. This is outside the field of psychology 
and we are here concerned with the mechanism, 
not the content of the mystic experience. A full 
discussion of this phase of the subject would take 



MYSTICISM AND NEUROTIC STATES 99 

us far afield into the realms of philosophy upon 
its most metaphysical side as well as theology 
upon its rationalistic side; it would involve dis- 
cussion of the nature of the Divine as evidenced 
in things external to ourselves. Psychology 
may deal with the Divine in the human as evi- 
denced in human behavior; but there its in- 
quiries must stop. 



VI. THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 

AT the beginning of our first chapter we 
stated that one of the burning questions 
of human life is "Why does evil exist in a 
universe which, we suppose, is divinely ordered?" 
From Job to Omar Khayyam the bitter cry has 
gone up, "Why is evil existent, why does a good 
God allow evil to crush out the very soul of 
man?" And the response of the human soul is 
as varied as human temperament. It ranges 
from the meek acquiescence of Job, who cries 
out in the midst of his sore affliction, "All the 
days of my appointed time will I wait until my 
release come," to the proudly cynical and bitter 
taunt of Omar, 

Thou wilt not with Predestined Evil round 
Enmesh and then impute my fall to sin. 

A good deal of this anxious questioning arises 
from confusion in the popular mind as to the 
nature of evil. There are two kinds of evil: cos- 
mic evil, which is nothing more or less than the 
operation of natural and immutable law which 
man has either advertently or inadvertently vio- 
lated ; and the personal evil operative in human 
life, which has its origin in human impulse and 



THE PROBLEM OF EVIL IOI 

human conduct, the cure of which is to be sought 
and found in man himself. Much of cosmic evil 
is doubtless due to the evolution of the universe. 
The scientist tells us that volcanic action and 
earthquakes, which have so devastated the 
world, are necessary to the maintenance of land- 
life; that were volcanic action to cease, the 
surging oceans would soon eat away the land. 
A world in which volcanic action has ceased 
is a dead world. 

However, cosmic evil (if the term be not a 
misnomer) need not concern us here as it is not 
under our control. What concerns us is the evil 
manifested in human life and human relations. 
Much of this is due to the Unconscious, which, 
being a repository of individual and racial mem- 
ories, emotional in its nature, and capable of but 
one emotion, desire, is therefore non-moral. It 
is not consciously immoral; it has nothing to do 
with the ethical at all. It is a giant whose 
one feeling is appetite; it is a savage, incapable 
of appreciation of the difference between good 
and evil. 

We saw in our first chapter how primitive re- 
ligion lacks the ethical note, and how a definite 
moral code is the product of racial experience 
acting over a long period. Retaining as we do 
the primitive emotional element in the Uncon- 
scious, we are at times defeated in our conflict 
with this Titan, elemental impulses get the bet- 
ter of us, and some harm to a fellow man is 



102 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

wrought. The efforts of this chained giant to 
emerge from his lair and overwhelm judgment 
and logic are sometimes attended with success. 
A tremendous struggle ensues when he tugs at 
his bonds, and if we go down before him, his vol- 
canic outburst will wreck everything that comes 
in his way. This we call evil, and it is for the 
most part, unconsciously motivated. The Un- 
conscious blazes a path to a given end and recks 
little of what may stand in its way. 

It is, on the whole, likely that we exaggerate 
the power of evil to harm. We have seen that no 
extraneous evil in human life is too grievous to 
bear if the individual be armed with the defen- 
sive weapons of the normal person; that it is 
only as the personality is weakened by some neu- 
rotic inner conflict that the individual is so 
weakened as to be unfit to bear the troubles that 
afflict him in the ordinary course of human 
events. 

The evils hardest to bear are those self- 
created, the bugaboos of the Unconscious. They 
are Protean in form and give rise to a variety of 
nameless fears: fear of disease, which we call 
hypochondria; fear of death with an ambivalent 
longing for it; fear of incapacity for a task of 
which the individual is entirely capable ; fear of 
insanity; fear of moral disintegration. Under 
this head come all the phobias: claustrophobia, 
a fear of closed places; agoraphobia, fear of 
open spaces, and a thousand others. These 



THE PROBLEM OF EVIL IO3 

make the patient miserable, his life a burden, 
and not the least of his troubles is the unsym- 
pathetic attitude of healthy acquaintances who 
strive to laugh him out of his fears and thereby 
aggravate them. 

It is probable that the greatest evil of human 
life is fear, that potent destroyer of human hap- 
piness. To-day we know the genesis of most of 
these fears. Phobias and anxiety-states are due 
to unconscious repression of the natural in- 
stincts, inhibition of the normal functional ac- 
tivity of the psyche. And we have definite proof 
that a repression of normal emotion through 
some vicious complex, a stopping of the natural 
outlet of human feeling, metamorphoses the re- 
pressed emotion into a feeling of fear and 
anxiety. John uttered a profound truth when he 
said, "Perfect love casteth out fear." 

Let us not strive to minimize these evils be- 
cause they seem to have so slight a basis. 
Grasset {The Semi-Insane and the Semi-Respon- 
sible) says, "In such cases fear is paralyzing and 
agonizing. Instead of being the starting-point 
of wise measures of defence, the unconscious 
reactions to this fear are inhibitive and frantic. 
This fear makes the subject perspire, presses on 
his chest, makes his limbs shake or give way, or 
if it makes him fly from danger, he will fly fool- 
ishly and in the wrong direction. It is ii/this 
respect that such fear is distinctly diseased." 
(Page 106.) "Doubtless," he continues, "these 



104 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

fears were defence reactions in the long ago, but 
they have long outlived their usefulness." 

For the neurotic who is obsessed by these pho- 
bias, life is a waking nightmare; every turn in 
the path is beset with foes; if he walk abroad, 
an enemy lurks behind every corner; if he remain 
at home dark shadows and forebodings oppress 
him, his life is a burden to himself and to others. 
He is sure to feel that he is persecuted; 
passers-by give him dark looks ; voices utter vile 
epithets: he will exhibit many if not all of the 
symptoms of a definite psychosis and yet be but 
the victim of an anxiety-hysteria. Small wonder 
that those so obsessed question God's providence 
and contend in season and out that whatever or 
whoever rules the universe, it must be some evil 
force. Pfister tells of a young dentist, who was 
so obsessed by these fears and hallucinations 
that he no longer went abroad. And of course, al- 
though the neurotic is not aware of it, the enemy 
is to be looked for not without, but within. 

Dostoievsky, the Russian novelist, seems to 
have been aware of the subjective nature of 
these mysterious fears. "There was a frightful 
fear of something which I cannot define, of some- 
thing which I cannot conceive, which does not 
exist, but which rises before me as a horrible, 
distorted, inexorable, and irrefutable fact." 

Moussorgsky, the gifted Russian composer of 
"Boris Goudounov," has given in his study of 
the obsessed Czar, Boris, a picture of the haunt- 



THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 105 

ing fears of his own life. Boris has instigated 
the murder of the Czarevitch, Dmitri, and the 
shade of the murdered lad haunts him in his last 
years. He essays peace of mind in religion, but 
it is of no avail. Everywhere he is pursued by 
this phantom, and his agonized cry, "Va, va, 
fanciul!" rings out through the barbaric strains 
of Moussorgsky's music until at length he drops 
dead in an hysterical fit. While the composer 
pictures the fear of Boris as due to an objective 
cause, there is no doubt that the opera is a page 
of his own autobiography. It is probably more 
than coincidence that the first dramatic music 
Moussorgsky composed was a chorus from the 
play of CEdipus, which had just been translated 
into Russian. 

An educator, X, was obsessed by feelings 
of nameless fear during the day, and hysterical 
symptoms at night. If he happened to be in a 
train that was going through a tunnel, he suf- 
fered from claustrophobia; if the train had a 
sudden access of speed, he feared it would be 
wrecked; in either case, he felt that the train 
would never reach the terminal. If he had to 
remain for any length of time in a wide public 
square he felt that some unknown enemy might 
creep upon him from behind (agoraphobia) ; he 
went constantly in fear of fainting and sudden 
death. When he rose to address an audience, 
he felt as though he were about to lose his voice 
or drop fainting on the platform. At night, he 



106 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

was wakened from a sleep apparently sound and 
dreamless by palpitation of the heart, and a 
dyspnoea, with an intense feeling of suffocation. 
His work became daily more difficult of execu- 
tion; life was a burden, even while he feared 
death. He lost faith in God and his aboulia 
made the ordinary acts of every-day life increas- 
ingly difficult. 

It was found that he was suffering from an 
anxiety-hysteria, due to an infantile fixation, 
added to which was a faulty sex-education that 
induced intense repression of instinct during 
adolescent years. It is true, he had had a real 
physical disturbance; some ten years previous 
to the onset of these attacks, he had suffered 
from a functional heart disorder. This had been 
completely cured, but the free floating anxiety 
aroused by his vicious complex and bad educa- 
tion had attached itself to this later functional 
disorder, so that to his other fears was added 
that of his heart's failing at any moment. An 
unwise physician had increased the severity of 
the anxiety attacks by telling him that he might 
drop dead in one of them! He was entirely 
cured of this morbid condition, but the discussion 
of the method of cure belongs to another 
chapter. 

Authorities are agreed that these victims are 
deserving of even more of our sympathy than the 
physically diseased; for the latter have at least 
a fund of mental and moral strength upon which 



THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 107 

to draw, while the former are robbed even of 
this support. 

Formerly, the neurotic was looked upon as a 
hopeless hypochondriac who had no real ail- 
ment, or as the unlucky victim of incurable 
mental disease due to hereditary taint, according 
as the observer was an ignorant and materialistic 
layman, or a wise and sympathetic alienist. To- 
day we are discovering how closely the neuroses 
may imitate the psychoses, and we find that 
even certain of the latter will yield to psycho- 
analytic treatment. 

There is no doubt that a vicious theology and 
ill-advised religious training are to be held re- 
sponsible for many of these disturbances. The 
threat is used as a weapon. The child is threat- 
ened from its earliest years that unless it does 
thus and so and refrains from doing this and 
that, it is in danger of divine punishment. "God 
wants you to do so and so ; God will punish you 
if you do so and .so," says the unwise mother. 
This is to inculcate the law of fear — primitive 
and savage — instead of the law of love, and 
can have nothing but a pernicious influence upon 
the child's sensitive plastic nature. He comes 
to believe that whatever is natural is sinful. We 
forget that normally the child is not governed 
by the same standards that rule adult life. For 
instance, following the lead of prehistoric an- 
cestors, he is a predatory animal, unconscious 
of meutn and tuum. Unconcernedly he appro- 



108 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

priates the property of another. He is not con- 
scious of sin. But he is at once made to feel 
that his sin is almost unpardonable. We ought 
to remember that the child does not inherently 
have a high sense of honor; he must learn this 
through long experience and training; but we 
attribute to him the same high standards of 
honor that we ourselves have after a lifetime of 
training. The child does not stop to think be- 
fore it acts — like its primitive ancestors it acts 
on impulse, not after mature thought and reflec- 
tion on consequences, but from the urge of im- 
mediate desire. We are short-sighted when we 
pounce upon it and make it believe that there 
is no punishment too severe for the crime it has 
committed. Many a time one sees a child weep 
bitterly when thus wantonly and cruelly at- 
tacked by an elder who should have known 
better. The child may be gently led to act from 
higher motives; he cannot be driven. To drive 
the child is to harden his nature, kill his spon- 
taneity, make him a small prig, a little hypo- 
crite, who acts not from inner springs but be- 
cause some older person has imposed his own 
standards upon him, has forced the idea upon 
him that he must act thus and so without fur- 
nishing reasons. The child is made a hypocrite 
because, from his viewpoint, this is not the 
proper spring of action, it is forced upon him 
from without, and worst of all a conflict ensues 
between his own developing nature and the 



THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 109 

impossible ideals forced upon him. This is the 
frequent beginning of a neurosis which will fol- 
low him all his life long. 

Again, our lack of proper sex education gives 
rise to many mental and nervous troubles. The 
sex education of the child is, as a rule, utterly 
neglected by parent and teacher. The growing 
child knows nothing of sex except as his inquir- 
ing mind reaches out for any bit of information 
that may surreptitiously be had. Sex matters 
are surrounded by an alluring mystery; they 
"are not nice," and this is sufficient to attract 
his eager mind, anxious to know everything in 
the world about him. Information is forth- 
coming in the form of obscene stories and expres- 
sions that he hears from children a little older 
than himself. When the storms incident to the 
beginning of adolescence suddenly assail him, 
they find him totally unprepared for the on- 
slaught. Tremendous changes suddenly begin 
to take place in his physical and mental being; 
new emotions sweep over him. His world tot- 
ters and crashes about him; his ideals, the false 
and prudish ideals inculcated by unwise teachers, 
crash down in ruin, as he finds that the very 
things which had been presented to his youthful 
mind as unclean are the basic things of human 
life. He discovers that his own parents have 
been guilty of the act which all his teaching has 
led him to believe an unspeakable and carnal sin. 
He is completely at sea, and only the long years 



110 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

that follow will re-educate him, give him a true 
perspective of his sex-life and sex-life in general. 
But meanwhile? Meanwhile the seeds of a neu- 
rosis are sown in fertile soil; it is likely as not, 
more likely than not, that he will suffer from 
some sex-perversion or from sexual anaesthesia, 
for his early training has repressed his normal 
sexual feeling. His whole life may be embittered 
and his mind obsessed by the nameless fears that 
grow out of such repression. 

In the third place, materialistic physicians, 
who hold that the entire practice of medicine 
consists in the diagnosis of physical ills and 
medication, are to blame for many of the mental 
and nervous ills from which mankind suffers. 
The physician of the old school had no sym- 
pathy for the nervous sufferer. He hated to see 
the hypochrondriac approaching, for he knew 
that he would hear a long recital of what he 
termed imaginary ills, that is, ills which are not 
of a physical nature and are not at all what the 
patient thinks they are. With such a patient, he 
would take one of two courses. He would either 
argue with him, reiterating over and over the 
statement that there was nothing wrong with 
him, thereby setting up resistances in the mind 
of one already suffering from too many; or else, 
without argument, he would administer some 
drug, perhaps strychnia, which is always a safe 
guess in nervous cases, since it gives a patient a 
sense of well-being temporarily, because it has a 



THE PROBLEM OF EVIL III 

stimulating effect upon the nervous system; or, 
thirdly, he might give him a bolus of pills com- 
posed solely of sugar of milk. The patient 
would get no better, hence he would finally leave 
the doctor with feelings of mental anguish mixed 
with hatred for the well-meaning but ignorant 
physician. Perhaps he would try physician after 
physician, spend all his substance, but gain no 
relief. Such a patient knows that he suffers 
from a real affliction, whatever the diagnostician 
may say. He suffers from all sorts of obsessions 
and anxieties; he cannot sleep, or his sleep is 
broken and rendered hideous by nightmares and 
sudden wakings with terrifying symptoms which 
he thinks predict his doom. Sometimes the 
patient is suffering from some physical ill in 
addition to his neurosis or hysteria. Then an 
ignorant and cruel physician has been known to 
terrify him by telling him that he may drop dead 
at any moment, or that unless he does thus and 
so, he is condemned to a life of confirmed and 
hopeless invalidism. An eminent physician diag- 
nosed a case as aneurism of the thoracic aorta. 
He told the patient immediately to go home, go 
to bed; that though it was exceedingly doubtful, 
his life might thus be saved. Imagine the state 
of mind of this patient! He died soon after, his 
end probably hastened by fright as well as his 
serious ailment. There was also the case of the 
educator, X, whom I have already mentioned, 
whom an eminent diagnostician told that he 



112 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

might fall dead in one of his hysterical attacks, 
thereby increasing the intensity and frequency 
of the attacks. An intelligent man of forty 
rushed, white and breathless, into the office of a 
friend of mine. Two physicians had just told 
him, independently of each other, that he had 
a blood-pressure of 200! Here was just cause 
for alarm. My friend took his blood-pressure, 
which was 143, that is, normal. The patient 
was still in doubt, so my friend sent for a col- 
league, who took the man's blood-pressure, and 
found that his instrument read 143 (thus cor- 
roborating my friend's finding). It was a long 
time before he could allay the patient's justly- 
aroused fears. What must one think of the other 
two physicians? 

We see from the above recital, how many and 
varied are the elements that cause ungrounded 
fear in the minds of both the normal and the 
abnormal; how the element of evil in human 
life is not only aggravated by bad methods of 
education, but how fears are created in the mind 
by such wrong procedures, fears that have no 
basis in reality; and how, in general, a false 
view of life as a whole is engendered through 
such misinformation and such pernicious 
methods. 

It must be quite clear to us, then, that the 
worst evils of human life do not exist at all in 
the world without ; they are created in the inner, 
psychic world. For we not only bear those ills 



THE PROBLEM OF EVIL II3 

we have, but we fly to others that we have not 
known until some pernicious force or some well- 
meaning person plants them in our minds. 

Finally, let me here reiterate that to the nor- 
mal person life seems good. Wherever a man or 
a woman is to be found who takes misanthropo- 
morphic, pessimistic, cynical views of the world 
and its Creator, it may usually be concluded 
that that person is suffering from a vicious com- 
plex with its accompanying neurosis or hysteria. 
In this connection we must mention the psy- 
choses or so-called insanities, 1 especially of the 
melancholic or manic-depressive type, which ex- 
hibit all the symptoms of the hysterias, which, 
if they are not caused by false religious teaching, 
at least show a bad religious outlook, with all the 
fear of death and the Hereafter, or of having 
committed the "unpardonable sin" (whatever 
that may be), and which give the patient a bad 
outlook on life. These have been considered 
extremely difficult or impossible to cure. It is 
likely, it may be said for the encouragement of 
the nervous patient, that these are of far less 
frequent occurrence than was formerly sup- 
posed, since the more frequent neuroses and hys- 
terias have many of the same symptoms. Even 
for the psychoses, the outlook is more favorable 

1 This is the field for the alienist, not for the lay writer. This 
paragraph must therefore be considered with due caution, as the 
observation of the layman is naturally too limited to allow of 
dogmatic statement. 



114 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

than formerly, since in their incipient stages 
they are amenable to psycho-analytic treatment. 
As for the neuroses and the hysterias (it is 
difficult to draw the line between them), I think 
that I am safe in saying that they are never con- 
genital, that they have their origin some time in 
the life, usually the very early life, of the patient, 
that they are in a majority of cases curable by 
modern psycho-therapeutic methods, and that 
with their cure the individual who saw all of life 
as unmixed evil becomes sane, normal, and opti- 
mistic, and that, as he is drawn out of himself 
and his inner conflicts are resolved, his mental 
and moral equilibrium is restored and he sees 
that life is on the whole good. Rid of his neuro- 
sis and its anxieties, he will cease vexing himself 
with the futile questions whether a good God has 
created and orders the universe, why if He is 
good he allows evil in the world, and whether in 
such a world any effort is worth while, for he will 
realize that these metaphysical doubts were the 
objectification of his own inner conflict, now 
ended forever. Instead of these futile question- 
ings and introspection which leads no whither, 
he will turn his gaze outward, utilize his energy 
for social ends, and strive to make the world bet- 
ter by his effort rather than waste his energies 
in repining. 



VII. PATHOLOGICAL RELIGIOUS TYPES 

WE saw in a former chapter how certain 
religious states are the direct outcome of 
neurotic tendencies, and how certain complexes 
may drive the devotee to the repressed state 
where the mystic experience is possible. 

We have seen how the complex-driven in- 
dividual may seek refuge from reality in oneness 
with God. On the other hand, he may be driven 
entirely away from religion, into religious doubt, 
agnosticism, or atheism. In this connection we 
have noted how the (Edipus-complex, which in- 
volves hatred of the father or the father-image, 
may direct the individual's hatred to God as the 
Father of mankind. We have likewise seen 
something of the so-called metaphysical neu- 
rotic type, who cannot let a day pass without 
questioning the beneficence of the Creator and 
whose world-view (Weltanschauung) is a reflec- 
tion of his own vicious complex. 

The complex may appear in other types than 
the mystic or the religious doubter. There is 
the Sadistic type, who derives great enjoyment 
from pain inflicted upon others. The term is 
derived from the novels of the Comte de Sade, 
which exploit the cruelty of man to woman. Re- 
us 



Il6 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

ligious fanatics, have frequently evinced such a 
disposition in relation to their fellow-men. To 
comprehend this trait, we must understand the 
psychic history of the individual. 

Every child normally lives through a Sadistic 
period, when his keenest pleasure is from pain 
inflicted upon others. The small boy, apparently 
from wanton cruelty, loves to torture a poor toad 
or vivisect a harmless frog. I have seen small 
boys drag water-snakes from the brook and, 
grasping them by the tail, snap their heads 
off. "How horrible!" some one may say. Yes, 
but the child must live through the history of the 
human race ; this Sadistic period is the period of 
savagery which he is living through. It is the 
period during which he loves to bully younger 
and smaller children; it probably gives him a 
feeling of superior strength and courage. Pfister 
{Psycho-analytic Method, page 77) speaks of a 
sixteen-year-old boy who "sees a charming kit- 
ten sitting in the sun. At once there awakens 
in him the burning desire to maltreat it. A fear- 
ful unrest seized him until he procured a stick 
and struck the sleeping animal on the nose with 
all his strength. The young cat was half dead 
from pain and fright but the boy had a strong 
feeling of pleasure." 

The youth was of course abnormal. In nor- 
mal individuals, the Sadistic period is quickly 
outgrown, and the growing youth becomes in- 
creasingly conscious of kindly, altruistic im- 



PATHOLOGICAL RELIGIOUS TYPES 117 

pulses, his attention is focused on the world 
without and its varied demands, he prepares for 
his life-work, and this involves the consideration 
of others. But there are individuals in whom 
Jhis tendency is never broken up, who are Sadis- 
tic all their lives long. These, in the political 
world are the Neroes. They fiddle while Rome 
burns; they love to see writhing victims boiled 
in oil or serving as human torches to light a fes- 
tal night. It stirs some dead impulse in them to 
renewed life, they doubtless have a keen sense 
of well-being while the torturing process is going 
on. Sardou gives us a grimly realistic, if revolt- 
ing, picture in his play Tosca, in which he de- 
picts the abnormal elderly roue Scarpia making 
amorous advances to the singer, Floria Tosca, 
while the groans of her tortured lover are heard 
and the reflection of the torture-fire is seen, from 
an adjoining room. 

The Sadistic type is frequently found in the 
religious life. Tertullian, one of the Church 
Fathers, described as an "expert controversial- 
ist," is said to have declared that one of the chief 
pleasures of the saint in heaven is to gaze over 
the battlements at sinners suffering in the flames 
of hell below. Torquemada, father of the Span- 
ish Inquisition, first Grand Inquisitor under Fer- 
dinand and Isabella, was strongly Sadistic. 
Under his jurisdiction, the dungeons of the Do- 
minican monastery at Seville became too small 
to hold the numerous prisoners incarcerated for 



IlS RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

some heresy, and more than two thousand were 
burned within a year or two. Horrible beyond 
belief are the engines of his cruelty: the rack, 
the thumb-screw, the iron virgin lined with 
spikes, the Procrustian bed to fit which the 
prisoner's limbs were drawn out until the bones 
cracked, or were lopped off as the case neces- 
sitated. The inquisitors were inflamed with a 
blood-lust which only increasingly terrible tor- 
tures w r ould satisfy. It was all done to "the 
glory of God," that is, to satisfy the demands of 
the (Edipus-complex. 1 

We shrink with horror from contemplation of 
these scenes, and well we may, for we know that 
these inquisitors were abnormal, that they were 
the victims of some neurosis. What we fail to 
realize is that Sadism in modified and less cruel 
form prevails in religion even to the present day. 
The days when Catholic persecuted Protestant, 
as in the Huguenot massacre on St. Barthol- 
omew's Eve in France, when Protestant perse- 
cuted Catholic, as in the days of Henry VIII in 
England or the Calvinistic regime in Geneva, 
when the stern-visaged Puritans drove the Qua- 

1 Salome, who had demanded the head of John the Baptist as a,, 
reward for her dancing, is a type of Sadism. As portrayed in 
Oscar Wilde's play of that name, she has fallen wildly in love 
with John, who resists her advances. Her craving is gratified by / 
the beheading of John; she takes the severed head in her arms 
and lavishes fondest caresses upon it; a disgusting spectacle and 
one which could have been conceived by no normal man. Dr. 
Coriat has made a masterly analysis of the play. 



PATHOLOGICAL RELIGIOUS TYPES II9 

kers from their midst — these days seem remote. 
Yet, so long as individuals suffer from some vi- 
cious complex which arises from an infantile fix- 
ation, Sadism in religion will persist. We are all 
familiar with individuals who subject their 
wives to extreme cruelty which runs the gamut 
from dragging a woman about by the hair of her 
head to subjecting her to bitter invective, humili- 
ating her in public, making life a burden to her 
in numerous cruel, if petty ways. These types 
are pathological; their Unconcious is, so to 
speak, still in a state of infancy. They suffer 
from arrested development, not intellectual, but 
emotional. Their minds may be keen, their 
brains alert, they may seem to be mature, but 
emotionally they are still cruel monsters of 
young boys. They need psychic re-education. 

It may seem strange, but churches are full of 
this type; long-faced saints who would deprive 
the young of all innocent amusement, and who 
see evil in the most harmless of youthful diver- 
sions. Suffering as they do from repression of 
their own sex instinct, they read evil meanings 
into all associations of the sexes. They see evil 
in all things because they delight to see evil, non- 
plussed though they would be at the discovery 
of their inner motives! It is their pleasure to 
deprive qthers of everything which might make 
them happy. How utterly selfish their philos- 
ophy of life is they cannot realize, for they are 
pathological individuals who, from no fault of 



120 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

their own, have been made to see life in somber 
hues; they are the misogynists, the pessimists, 
the cynics. Let us look upon them with charity, 
for they are not to blame for their condition and 
their lives are desperately unhappy. 

Apparently opposed in character to the Sadist, 
yet vastly similar, is the Masochist, who derives 
pleasure from pain inflicted upon himself. Mas- 
ochism takes its name from an Austrian novelist, 
Sacher-Masoch, who depicted this form of 
cruelty in his novels. The Masochist, as we have 
seen in the chapter on "Mysticism," gains the 
greatest pleasure from pain which he inflicts 
upon himself or induces others to inflict upon 
him. While this seems the opposite of Sadism, 
it is in reality a derivative or reaction therefrom. 
We have seen how, by the principle of ambiva- 
lence or change of values, an emotion can change 
into its precise opposite; we often see strong 
love transformed into equally strong hate. 
It may also happen that the Masochist has in- 
flicted pain upon others until it no longer arouses 
his jaded appetites, and accidentally finds that 
pain inflicted upon himself will still act as a 
stimulus. Sometimes, this tendency may be 
caused by love of violent contrast. Paul is a 
good example of this ambivalent tendency. 

St. Francis, who was reared in great luxury, 
albeit under the domination of a harsh father, 
when he finally turned to the ascetic life, re- 
moved the very garments he was wearing and 



PATHOLOGICAL RELIGIOUS TYPES 121 

offered them to his father at the altar, an act 
which can be interpreted only as Masochistic. 
It was the extreme and superfluous symbolic re- 
nunciation of his former life. The Indian fakir 
exhibits this trait when he holds one arm out- 
stretched until it becomes shrivelled and atro- 
phied, or walks barefoot over hot coals. The 
religious recluse who betakes him to the desert 
places to endure extreme privation, and the pillar 
saint who, like St. Simon Stylites, spends his life 
on the top of a tall pillar, where he gains in grace 
what he loses in comfort and thus becomes the 
admired of the ignorant multitude, think, like 
those of old who offered rich sacrifices, to pro- 
pitiate the gods by the richest gifts in their power 
to bestow, and are examples of the Masochistic 
tendency in religion. Origen, a great and good 
man, mistaking the sense of Matthew xix 12, 
actually practiced self-mutilation, in order to 
win the Kingdom of Heaven. 

The self-deprecatory, saintly, meek type which 
formerly we met so frequently in our churches, 
is decidedly Masochistic. There can be no 
doubt that the Christian woman who bears 
meekly the abuses of a Sadistic husband, derives 
a Masochistic pleasure from the pain and fright. 
As we saw in a previous chapter, the Christian 
martyrs had developed a strong Masochistic 
strain in their religion, so that they went to tor- 
ture and death with songs upon their lips. 

We have seen in the chapter on the "Motiva- 



122 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

tion of Human Life," that all our decisions are in 
reality "value judgments," that there is always 
in human life a balancing of one good against 
another, and that the ego chooses that thing 
which promises the greatest happiness. For 
some men this is immediate pleasure without re- 
gard to consequences; for others, the greater 
reward is some far-off good, for which they will 
forsake present pleasure. Normal, abnormal, 
Sadistic, Masochistic — all are making impor- 
tant decisions from day to day through this very 
mechanism which I have described at such 
length in these chapters. If our complexes are 
such that we can see only present good, we will 
reach out and grasp it at all costs; if our com- 
plexes point to the future, we will eschew pres- 
ent good for future reward. Hence, our lack of 
comprehension of one another. Completely to 
understand one another, we should have to know 
our varied life histories and the complexes which 
motivate human life. We needs must have a 
background of the new psychology ere we can 
get a grasp on the motivation of life, or the 
peculiar characteristics of religious types. 

There seems but little purpose in any lengthy 
discussion of the psychoses in this place. From 
our present knowledge of the subject, we are 
reasonably safe in saying that religion per se, 
in any of its phases or with any of its dogmas, 
has never really driven man or woman mad. A 
psychosis will very often, however, take on re- 



PATHOLOGICAL RELIGIOUS TYPES 123 

ligious coloring, or will prove the instigating 
cause that drives the individual into religious 
seclusion, bad religious teaching may help to 
develop the psychosis, or the self-reproaches in- 
cident to the advance of the psychosis will cause 
him to seek peace and consolation at the foot of 
the altar. A youthful sufferer from dementia- 
praecox whom Pfister treated, was in the habit 
of drawing pictures of chapels surrounded by 
cypress trees in front of which a river ran with 
floating corpses. The same youth would go and 
sit for hours opposite an insane asylum, longing 
to be insane so that he might have the seclusion 
and isolation in which to dream his erotic dreams 
and develop his erotic fancies unmolested. Had 
a monastery been as conveniently situated as 
the asylum, it is quite likely that the youth 
would have longed for the cloistered peace of a 
religious institution rather than the cell of an 
insane asylum. Environment often furnishes 
convenient molds into which neurotic fancies 
may be poured, and though the content will be 
the same, the form will vary as the environment 
predisposes. Patients with "delusions of gran- 
deur" will build up their visions in the form of 
magnificent palaces and great cities, which may 
vary from some heathen Elysium or Walhalla, to 
castles in Spain, or the New Jerusalem, accord- 
ing as their early training, environment, or read- 
ing predispose them. 

It would seem, therefore, that religion per se 



124 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

has never driven a normal person into a psy- 
choneurosis; it cannot be called a definite, effi- 
cient cause of such a malady. We know defi- 
nitely, however, that an over-ascetic early train- 
ing, harshness of over-religious parents or 
teachers, have helped to develop neuroses, espe- 
cially those arising from the (Edipus-complex. 
There is no doubt whatever that harsh and over- 
strict religious training plays a prominent role 
in the development of neurotic fancies. A con- 
spiracy of evil events and conditions, together 
with too exacting religious and moral demands, 
has often seemed to drive an individual into a 
definite psychoneurosis, chronic and incurable; it 
is doubtful, however, whether these were more 
than chance instigators of the neurosis or the 
precipitating cause, the real, fundamental cause 
lying elsewhere. It is also likely that the psy- 
chology which deals with this province has suf- 
fered from a too ardent desire upon the part of 
the alienist to classify and categorize. The many 
classes of "religious mania" are probably noth- 
ing but different aspects of the same sort of 
neurosis; one is appalled at the elaborate and 
artificial classifications of the older psychology, 
every individual development of neurosis, or 
hysteria, bringing out anew classification. More- 
over, many ailments, which involve personal 
eccentricities, vagaries, oddities, or even more 
serious nervous difficulties, and which were for- 
merly included among the psychoses, are now 



PATHOLOGICAL RELIGIOUS TYPES 125 

seen to be curable neuroses, not congenital, but 
acquired, and therefore curable. When the neu- 
rosis is cured, the morbid religious emotion of 
the patient disappears. 

Thus, the religious hallucinations which are 
hysterical phenomena due to repressions, disap- 
pear when the sex-craving is released from the 
long repression and the patient becomes normal. 
The woman who had visions of Christ coming 
and bearing her away in his arms to heaven, who 
saw angels ascending and descending a celestial 
stair, with purple clouds of glory, ceased to be- 
hold these visions when her nervous difficulty, 
which was caused by sexual trauma, was cured. 

It sometimes occurs that certain of the split- 
off personalities of a dissociated personality will 
be highly religious, while others will be irreli- 
gious, profane, and even blasphemous to the last 
degree. One of the personalities of Miss Beau- 
champ, whom Dr. Prince cured of her dissocia- 
tion, was sober, subdued, and very religious and 
devout, whereas the "Sally" personality was 
harum-scarum and unprincipled, delighting to 
inflict pain (Sadistic-Masochistic complex) 
upon the more sober personality. At one period 
of the treatment, Miss Beauchamp was horrified 
to behold in a gazing-crystal a vision of herself 
smoking a cigarette, the work of the mischievous 
Sally. 

The value of a religion which drives the in- 
dividual away from the living, pulsing world of 



126 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

men and things is questionable, even if it be not 
due to a definite neurosis, hysteria, or psychosis. 
If religion does not help man to adapt himself 
to his environment, nor fit him to play a definite, 
decisive, active role as an integral part of the 
social organism, it has little value either for him- 
self or for others. The picture of the mild-eyed 
ascetic living a secluded other-worldly life is not 
attractive to the modern mind, for it seems to 
this age abnormal. To normal persons, it seems 
a woeful waste of energy, a life futile and unpro- 
ductive, therefore unhappy. It is indeed a living 
death. 

Lest the reader think I have been unfair to re- 
ligion, allow me to say that many most suc- 
cessful sublimations have come about through 
its beneficent agency. Christianity has done 
wonders in the way of inducing a healthy, liber- 
ating piety. No danger to religion is to be feared 
from psycho-analysis. Pfister {Psych. An. 
Method, p. 414) says: "While psycho-analysis 
may disclose the emptiness of religious errors, it 
is helpful to a healthy piety which increases 
moral strength. To me, it is a mystery how 
anxious souls can fear damage to religion and 
morality from psycho-analysis. How closely the 
results of the latter stand to the commands of 
the Gospel, is easily demonstrated." Likewise 
Coriat ("The Future of Psycho-analysis," Psy- 
choanalytic Review, October, 191 7) : "As a type 
of emotional sublimation, religion, using the 



PATHOLOGICAL RELIGIOUS TYPES 127 

term in its broadest sense without any reference 
to any particular dogma, offers one of the most 
effective and satisfactory roots for the subli- 
mating process." I trust that this will be made 
sufficiently clear in the chapter on "Conversion." 



VIII. THE OCCULT IN MODERN 
RELIGIOUS SYSTEMS 

IN all religious systems, from the most primi- 
tive down to the most modern, the belief 
has been inculcated that when the physical body 
dies, the personality survives. The Greeks and 
the Romans believed that beyond the River Styx 
lay the abode of the dead, a sort of dream-world, 
where the shades of the departed wandered in 
dim meadows, wan shadows of their former 
selves. Dante has transferred much of this 
classic mythology to his Divina Commedia, add- 
ing certain mediaeval imagery and demonology. 
The American Indian believed that the departed 
warrior would survive in the Happy Hunting 
Ground, and survivors sent along with the dead, 
food and beasts of burden for the long journey. 
Norse mythology has its Walhalla to whose hal- 
lowed heights warriors fallen in battle are borne 
aloft by Walkyrs, where they sit forever feast- 
ing and on occasion tilting in celestial jousts 
whence they emerge unwounded to feast again. 
Mohammedanism has its Paradise where dark- 
eyed houris wait upon him who has died true to 
the faith. 

128 



THE OCCULT IN RELIGIOUS SYSTEMS 129 

Christianity no less has its heaven and its hell. 
They are a mixture of ancient Judaism, classic 
mythology, mediaeval imagery, and modern 
thought. The golden streets and pearly gates 
are Apocalyptic in character; the flames of hell 
are classic and mediaeval. 

Of late, due no doubt to the incalculable loss 
of life in the late war, there has been a wide- 
spread revival of spiritualism, or spiritism as 
the more scientific incline to call it. The So- 
cieties for Psychical Research, British and 
American, have been concerned for many years 
with a scientific investigation of the question of 
conscious survival after bodily death, and have 
much remarkable evidence to present. Circum- 
stantial data have been given through veracious 
(that is, honest and sincere) mediums of the 
character of the life of the hereafter. 

Whether a real, objective reality lies behind 
this evidence, I am not prepared to say; let us 
leave that to specialists in the field like Dr. Hys- 
lop and other psychic researchers. I am con- 
cerned with viewing the whole matter from the 
psycho-analytic points of view, and pointing out 
how easily we may be misled by tricks of the 
Unconscious in our researches in this field. 

Let us first ask whence arises this universal 
demand for a continuation of conscious life after 
physical disintegration? It seems to me that 
Freud's explanation is correct. The Unconscious, 
he states, cannot conceive of itself as annihil- 



130 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

ated. 1 The world is not even conceivable as 
having real existence without human conscious- 
ness to witness it. These trees that we behold 
with their stately branches waving in the breeze, 
the birds flitting from bough to bough, the ten- 
der grass on which we lean; all these are objects 
external to us, but the thing we know is not these 
externals themselves, but our perceptions of 
them, not our physical environment, but our 
reactions to that environment, our conceptions 
of it tinged by the emotional color which our 
complexes give it. We cannot conceive of a tree 
falling in the remotest forest without conceiving 

1 Reflections on War and Death, page 40: "Our attitude 
(toward death) has not been a sincere one. To listen to us we 
were, of course, prepared to maintain that death is the necessary 
termination of life, that everyone of us owes nature his death 
and must be prepared to pay his debt; in short, that death was 
natural, undeniable, and inevitable. In practice we were ac- 
customed to act as if matters were quite different. We have 
shown an unmistakable tendency to put death aside, to eliminate 
it from life. We attempted to hush it up, in fact, we have the 
proverb: to think of something as death. Of course we meant 
our own death. We cannot, indeed, imagine our own death; 
whenever we try to do so we find that we survive ourselves as 
spectators. The school of psycho-analysis could thus assert that 
at 'bottom no one believes in his own death, which amounts to 
saying: in the Unconscious every one of us is convinced of his 
immortality." Page 62 (ibid): "Our Unconscious does not be- 
lieve in its own death; it acts as though it were immortal. 
What we call our Unconscious, those deepest layers in our psyche 
which consist of impulses, recognizes no negative or any form 
of denial and resolves all contradictions, so that it does not 
acknowledge its own death, to which we can give only a 
negative content." 



THE OCCULT IN RELIGIOUS SYSTEMS 131 

at the same time that there is a witness to hear 
the sound and see the falling tree. So bound up 
are events of the external world with our inner 
consciousness. When we think of the external 
world at all, we must think of ourselves as view- 
ing it. Between the occasions when we view 
and react to familiar scenes, we can scarcely 
conceive of them as existent. 

"What?" we query, when a childhood scene 
is revisited after long years of absence, "are 
these trees still the same, does the grass still 
grow, do those cottages still stand, do those even- 
ing shadows still slant across the meadow as of 
old?" So hard it is to conceive of any reality 
apart from our own personality. 

So poignant is the feeling, so deep the an- 
guish, that the world may go on as before with 
its many activities and innumerable objects, its 
myriad relationships, when we are no longer here, 
that the Unconscious refuses to grasp or accept 
such a concept, the heart will not harbor nor 
tolerate such a feeling. As it is with so many 
beliefs, the wish is father to the thought, deep- 
seated desire, basic, primitive, inherent, creates 
a belief in the thing it seeks. Hence, the Uncon- 
scious refuses to accept the death-sentence. "I 
know," says the devout person, "that there 
must be life after death, because I feel it in my 
heart." Just so. 

From this deep-seated, racial longing for life 
eternal, men have built up elaborate and com- 



132 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

plex religious systems, full of occult ideas. Thus 
the systems of spiritism and theosophy have 
been built upon certain Oriental philosophies, 
certain classic myths, a great deal of primitive 
imagery and thought, certain metaphysical con- 
cepts of the Middle Ages, which varied strands 
have been woven into elaborate modern systems. 
It is the process by which all religious systems 
grow, that is, by absorption of ancient and con- 
temporary ideas, and elaborating them into a re- 
ligious philosophy. 

In modern spiritistic systems, the evidence is 
gathered either through professional or amateur 
mediums, or through such devices as ouija, plan- 
chette, automatic writing, or the like. There 
can be no doubt that the phenomena thus pro- 
duced well up directly from the Unconscious. 
The Unconscious, as has been proved again and 
again, is a tricksy sprite ; it loves to assume va- 
ried and motley roles, play little dramas, take 
some suggestion and work it out in some fan- 
tastic manner ; it loves any situation that brings 
it into the limelight. I do not claim that all 
spiritistic evidence is merely some phenomenon 
produced by the Unconscious, but I do say that 
we must be constantly on our guard against its 
tricks. This much is assured: that whereas the 
evidence for survival after bodily death may 
come from some region beyond the Unconscious, 
at all events it all comes through the Uncon- 
scious. It is more than likely that most of the 



THE OCCULT IN RELIGIOUS SYSTEMS 133 

so-called evidence gathered at amateur sittings 
is the direct work of the Unconscious, striving 
for recognition, playing its characteristic pranks. 

Many of the phenomena of a spiritistic seance 
can be produced by almost any group of people 
who will go through the necessary procedure, sit 
with patience and await developments. Many 
persons have experimented with table-tipping, 
planchette, ouija, and automatic writing, with- 
out the slightest notion of attributing any sig- 
nificance to the phenomena thus obtained be- 
yond the natural and the every-day. I have sat 
with a group around a small table, with finger- 
tips touching; after a time a tingling is felt in 
the fingers and up and down the arm (doubtless 
due to motor stimuli of some sort), and soon 
after the table will begin to move about the 
room, apparently of its own volition. This group 
was not in the least interested in summoning 
spirits from the vasty deep nor gathering evi- 
dence of life after death; the table-tipping was 
merely a diversion, undertaken to convince my 
sceptic mind that it could be done, and was 
attributed to some unknown magnetic or electric 
force generated by the human body. I was 
ready to aver that the movement was not due to 
muscular action, but to-day I am not so sure on 
that point. Had we asked questions of the 
moving table, doubtless we should have had 
replies. 

Ouija has furnished interesting and diverting 



134 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

moments. I have had messages from ouija 
which purported to come from departed friends. 
In every case they were puerile and untrust- 
worthy. While working with ouija one evening 
with a friend, a message which it was spelling 
out in reply to some question was rudely inter- 
rupted, the little tripod was violently wrested 
from our hands (or so it seemed) and the sen- 
tence, "This is Lonnie," was spelled. To the 
query, "Who is Lonnie?" the board replied, 
"Lonnie, otherwise Lawrence Ungar." It then 
proceeded to give a lengthy and circumstantial 
account of the life of one Lawrence Ungar, who 
claimed to have been a chaplain in the Federal 
Army during the Civil War. He was buried, so 
it was claimed, in a certain small town in South 
Carolina. For some time, on every occasion 
when we experimented with ouija, this Lonnie 
would break in and insist upon communicating. 
Here was a strange state of affairs. I finally 
wrote to the postmaster of the town in which 
Lonnie was alleged to be buried. I received a 
reply stating that no man of that name had ever 
lived there and certainly was not buried there. 
The whole thing, it appeared, was a hoax of the 
Unconscious. He who has read Freud's Inter- 
pretation of Dreams, will readily understand 
the mechanism by which the Unconscious had 
built up the scenes of the little drama and played 
it to our amazement, not to say amusement. 
In the first place, I had been thinking of an 



THE OCCULT IN RELIGIOUS SYSTEMS 135 

old school friend named "Lawrence," nicknamed 
"Lonnie," just prior to "Lonnie V first appear- 
ance. The friend who helped operate the board 
had been reading an article on Hungary, hence 
the name "Ungar." On the day previous to our 
experiment with the board, I had visited the 
grave of my grandfather, who had fought in the 
Civil War and who was known as a very devout 
man, with some pretension to gifts of preaching 
and exhorting. I myself was a student for the 
ministry and my mind was naturally preoccupied 
with the responsibilities of my chosen vocation. 
The mother of the friend who operated the 
board with me was staying at a resort in South 
Carolina not far from the small town which Lon- 
nie claimed as his native place. Here, then, was 
all the material for the little drama, a sort of 
dream condensation. 1 The little play itself was 
evidently the joint product of unconscious proc- 
esses in the two minds. Conan Doyle relates 
a somewhat similar experience; after which he 
wrote to an address given him in similar fashion, 
but, appropriately enough, as he says, the letter 
was returned to him from the Dead Letter 
Office! 

While I should not wish to go on record as 
attributing all such phenomena to some similar 
mechanism, I am fully persuaded that much of 
the so-called evidence for survival after death 
can be readily explained on the same basis. 

1 See Appendix for "dream condensation." 



136 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

There is, for instance, planchette, which is oper- 
ated through the use of a small pencil attached 
to a triangular board with wheels, which moves 
over the paper and writes. As it is operated by 
only one person as a rule, it seems likely that 
it is a variant on automatic writing. As a rule 
the replies obtained from planchette are trivial 
in the extreme; they are such that it seems a 
waste of time to bother with it at all. The wife 
of an engineer of my acquaintance, who had two 
small boys, put this question to planchette, 
"What will my boys do when they are grown?" 
and the reply was written, "J. will be an engi- 
neer, W. will be a sport." 

In most automatic writing are revealed traces 
of dissociated personality. While it has been 
used as a method of tapping the Unconscious or 
bringing to light the psychic processes of the 
split-off personality, it has, in some cases at least, 
tended to aggravate the symptoms and increase 
the malady. The procedure is thus: The indi- 
vidual sits down with pencil and paper, he en- 
gages in irrelevant conversation or reads a book. 
While his attention is thus consciously diverted, 
his hand and arm begin to work automatically 
and he writes, although until he reads what he 
has written he is not aware of its content. Some 
part of consciousness which has an independent 
existence is operative here; it is similar to the 
little drama which we played with the aid of 
ouija. Certain suggestions have been brought to 



THE OCCULT IN RELIGIOUS SYSTEMS I37 

the Unconscious; independently of conscious 
mental effort or processes, these suggestions have 
been elaborated into a psychic series which has 
the appearance of continuity and consecutive- 
ness. Like hysterical symptoms (in certain cases 
automatic writing is an hysterical symptom), 
automatic writing is the effort of unconscious, 
repressed forces to break through into conscious- 
ness and find an outlet in motility. They show 
the same process of symbolism, elaboration, con- 
densation and displacement as the " dream- 
work" (see Freud's Interpretation of Dreams, 
Chapter VI, for a full discussion of the dream- 
work), and bear the same relation to the pa- 
tient's life. 

A subject was given to automatic writing. 
The paper would be headed with certain roughly- 
drawn symbols. A circle within a triangle was 
the favorite, with small crosses dotted about. 
Then would follow a prophecy in a stilted, Latin- 
ized style, that the end of the dominance of the 
white races had come and the yellow and black 
races would now have their turn at world-domin- 
ion, or a similar message, couched in vague and 
general terms. During a psycho-analytic treat- 
ment which had been unduly prolonged, but 
which I hesitated to interrupt since abreaction 
was unusually successful, the subject suddenly 
saw a purple light, like a cloud of translucent va- 
por, near the twilit window toward which she was 
gazing, and she lifted up her voice in prophetic 



138 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

strain, declaring that President Wilson would 
lose much of his prestige and popularity in 
days to come from political opposition. I saw 
at once that she was in a semi-hypnotic state, 
and proceeded to bring her out of it, by stating 
almost rudely that any person who read the 
daily papers could safely make such a prediction 
(it was at the time when there was general dis- 
cussion over the President's first published draft 
of the Peace Treaty) and that "it needs no ghost 
come from the grave to tell us that." This sub- 
ject, who was of a philosophical and speculative 
turn of mind, had been reading a good deal of 
theosophical literature which dealt with reincar- 
nation, the lost Atlantis, and the like; she was 
an interested reader of current events, and in her 
own environment there was little opportunity 
for expression of her views. Her Unconscious 
had elaborated the suggestions brought to it, 
and worked out these Cassandra-like prophecies 
and given expression to them in her automatic 
writing and speech when in a semi-hypnotic 
state. When she was cured of her neurosis, the 
writing ceased, since she found her satisfactions 
in real life. 

It will thus be seen how readily those anxious 
for communications from the dead may be de- 
ceived by manifestations and phenomena which 
purport to be supernatural. The Unconscious 
of normal persons will at times play strange 
pranks, and in the case of neurotics these will 



THE OCCULT IN RELIGIOUS SYSTEMS 139 

take on the hue of the supernatural. We have 
therefore to be on our guard when dealing with 
such phenomena. 

The more mystic and occult forms of religion 
attract the neurotic inasmuch as they enable him 
to fly from reality. Thousands of neurotics have 
turned to spiritism and theosophy as a refuge 
from their too-harsh environment. This is not 
an arraignment of these systems, as thousands 
have likewise flown to the protection of more 
conventional religious systems for the same 
reason. With the neurotic who seeks refuge in 
these systems, the occultism, the element of the 
supernatural, appeal to his neurotic love of new 
sensations, the phenomena serve to stimulate 
jaded mental appetites; these neurotics are like 
drug-addicts, going from medium to medium, 
spending large sums of money, and living on the 
sensations derived from the highly-seasoned 
mental food purveyed. The primitive Uncon- 
scious is strong in all neurotics, and just as the 
witch-doctor makes the savage marvel with his 
prophecies and manifestations, so the commer- 
cial medium makes the neurotic marvel. 

I think it likely that in the case of neurotics, 
table-tipping, use of ouija, planchette, and auto- 
matic writing serve to fix and aggravate the neu- 
rosis and produce further mental dissociation. 
In some such cases, the whole mental and moral 
life has been given over to the primitive im- 
pulses of the Unconscious. Whereas in the nor- 



140 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

mal individual, intellectual effort rears a struc- 
ture of thought which serves to control and di- 
rect the Unconscious, through the practices of 
spiritism the neurotic gives the Unconscious more 
and more dominance of his life, until complete 
mental and moral breakdown may ensue. As 
spiritists themselves say, "When you open the 
door to departed spirits, all sorts of entities may 
enter in." To this they attribute all the so- 
called "spirit obsessions," and the vagaries fre- 
quently to be noted in the lives of mediums. In 
some cases, a severe psycho-neurosis may de- 
velop. Here let me say once more that I do not 
believe any form of religion drives a normal man 
or woman into a neurosis; the neurotic symp- 
toms assume such form as environment enables 
them to assume. The point is not that these 
systems are in a way abnormal, but that ab- 
normal persons are drawn to them and certain 
religious practices may fix and develop abnormal 
tendencies. 1 Psychic research, to say the least, 

1 The reader may object that my statement that "no normal 
person is driven into a neurosis by religion, that this is an 
accessory or instigating cause," must depend largely upon my 
definition of normality; that, in fact, I make the spirit in which 
an individual takes the troubles of this life a test of normality. 
This is true; I believe it is the one, valid, real test of normality: 
how the individual takes his afflictions, how successfully he faces 
his life-problem and bears his burdens. If he faces reality and 
overcomes or, if that be impossible, bears his troubles manfully, he 
is normal. If he is driven into a neurosis, he is abnormal, the 
seed of his disorder must have been sown long before in his 
infantile life. 



THE OCCULT IN RELIGIOUS SYSTEMS 141 

is a field of inquiry into which we must enter 
with the greatest caution and where we must 
constantly be on guard against self-deception 
and the charlantanry of the baser sort of com- 
mercial professional medium. 

Let us close this chapter with a discussion of 
certain larger aspects of the question of the 
relation of the Unconscious to life after death. 
A number of writers (Hudson being the first, I 
believe, in his Law of Psychic Phenomena, and 
James and Maeterlinck holding to the same be- 
lief in variant form) have advanced the theory 
that subliminally, all consciousness is one, that 
in the Unconscious all psychic life is united in 
one vast whole. Hudson deduces from this 
(which he himself terms a "working hypothe- 
sis'') that the Unconscious is thus the immortal 
part of personality and the sea of consciousness 
which it taps is the sea of eternity. He endeav- 
ors to explain all psychic phenomena on this 
basis, referring all evidence for life after death, 
or indeed any transference of thought over a 
distance between the living or the living and the 
dead, to the well-known " telepathic hypothe- 
sis." He claims that, inasmuch as the conscious- 
ness of both living and departed persons is a 
part of this vast sea, all individuals are thus en 
rapport with one another and that if one sounds 
(to carry out the figure) in the proper portion 
of this vast sea, any information that any person 
has ever had in his grasp may be brought to light. 



142 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

Hudson thought that we are storing up memories 
and images in the Unconscious for utilization in 
the life to come. James held to a modified form 
of this belief (see his essay on Immortality), 
although he did not stretch the telepathic hy- 
pothesis so far. 

Let it be said right here that the deepest re- 
cesses of the Unconscious have been tapped by 
modern psycho-analytic methods, but nothing 
has as yet been brought to light that supports 
this view. When the Unconscious is tapped by 
psycho-analytic methods, the matter brought to 
light is that connected with the subject's own 
past experience, his childhood memories, appar- 
ently forgotten events and persons of his past — 
circumstances important from the viewpoint of 
psycho-therapeutics, but nothing beyond these. 
It seems extremely unlikely that the very un- 
scientific views mentioned above will bear the 
light of investigation, and it is probable that the 
more thoroughly the Unconscious is examined, 
the less tenable these fantastic theories will be 
found to be. 

Maeterlinck, in a comparatively recent book, 
instances a young girl who was hypnotized and 
whose memory was forced back to earliest child- 
hood, then to infancy, then to a pre-natal state. 
Suddenly the timbre of the girl's voice changed 
and became that of an old woman who claimed 
that she had lived at a certain period prior to 
the girl's birth. Again the method of regres- 



THE OCCULT IN RELIGIOUS SYSTEMS 143 

sion was used and the timbre of the voice 
changed once more and became that of an old 
man, who claimed to have been a soldier of the 
Guarde of the first Napoleon. Some persons 
have taken this as proof of the theory of rein- 
carnation. It seems more than likely that it 
was nothing more than a characteristic trick of 
the Unconscious, utilizing bits of information 
which the girl had gathered during her waking 
life, which had impinged upon the margin of 
consciousness, were quickly repressed, and were 
elaborated into this little drama. To one who 
has read Prince's Dissociation of a Personality, 
and has learned of the metamorphoses which 
a dissociated personality can undergo, every 
separate one of the multiple personalities mani- 
festing a highly individualized character, this 
explanation will be the most acceptable. Com- 
pare Coleridge's famous case of the German girl 
ill of a fever, who spoke in Latin, Greek and 
Hebrew (James: Psychology I, page 68 1, quoted 
in Lay's Man's Unconscious Conflict), although 
in her waking life she knew nothing of these 
languages. It transpired that at the age of nine 
she had been taken into the home of a Protes- 
tant pastor, a great Hebrew scholar, and that it 
had been the good man's custom to walk up and 
down a passage leading into the kitchen and read 
to himself aloud from his books. "The books 
were ransacked and among them were found sev- 
eral of the Greek and Latin Fathers, together 



144 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

with a collection of Rabbinical writings. In 
these works so many of the passages taken down 
at the young woman's bedside were identified, 
that there could be no reasonable doubt as to 
their source." 

It is evident, is it not, that in the examination 
of psychic phenomena, the element of the super- 
natural must rigorously be excluded wherever 
there can be found a natural explanation. It is 
only by such means that we shall at length 
arrive at the truth. 



IX. CONVERSION AND ATTENDANT 
PHENOMENA 

CONVERSION may be considered the cli- 
mactic event of the religious life, for which 
conviction of sin, repentance, and the search 
for God are preparatory measures. When the 
sinner is at length "converted," "regenerated," 
"attains salvation," "has been redeemed," as the 
phrases variously run, it is held that he launches 
on a new and regenerated life. Whereas for- 
merly he was at odds with life, now he is pre- 
sumably one with God, living not under the 
Law but under Grace, in tune with all that is 
good and beautiful and worthy in the universe. 
Old temptations no longer have power to lure 
him from his new love, old fetters of sin have 
been broken leaving him in a new-found and 
glorious freedom; he is no longer the "old 
Adam," conceived in sin and eternally lost, he 
is the God-man, walking according to the per- 
fect law of God. 

Such is the ideal of conversion. Let us ex- 
amine its origin and its mechanism. What 
really happens when the individual is converted? 
Ere we answer this fundamental question, we 
must seek to ascertain what conditions lead him 

145 



146 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

to seek conversion, what sort of man this is 
who seeks conversion, and why he seeks it. 
This leads us to a consideration of re-birth. 



1. The Re-birth 

The first fact to be made clear is that not all 
individuals feel the need of regeneration, not all 
have a "conviction of sin," some never have it, 
and have no clear conception of it. These are 
the individuals free from neurotic taint, who 
have been reared in an atmosphere of love and 
kindliness, and have never felt internal con- 
flict. William James quotes Emerson (Vari- 
eties, page 167, note) as saying, "Our 
young people are diseased with the theolog- 
ical problems of original sin, origin of 
evil, predestination, and the like. These 
never presented a practical difficulty to 
any man — never darkened across any man's 
road, who did not go out of his way to seek them. 
They are the soul's mumps and measles, and 
whooping-coughs." 

There seems to be here a fundamental mis- 
apprehension of the problem. We have pre- 
viously seen that the "conviction of sin" is due 
to man's internal conflicts, that it arises when the 
inner primitive urge comes in conflict with 
outer, moral mandates, that it is a feeling of be- 
ing "out of tune" with life, especially immediate 
environment. The morbid introspection, the 



CONVERSION 147 

exggerated feeling of guilt of the neurotic are 
well-known. Such souls have been well termed 
"sick souls." These feelings are the product of 
neurotic disturbance. It is therefore not true 
that the theological problems of which Emerson 
speaks "never presented a practical difficulty to 
any man." 

On the other hand, James fails to sense that 
those who must "be born again to be happy" 
are nervously ill individuals. He speaks of the 
"divided self" which attains unity through sal- 
vation. What he seems not to realize is that 
this "divided self" is the sick self, that such feel- 
ing is always and everywhere indicative of a 
neurosis; that the "divided self" is never the 
normal self, indicating as it does a discordant, 
neurotic personality, and that conversion may or 
may not synthesize such a self into perfect 
unity. Conversion is an emotional experience 
and it may, like the "mystic experience," which 
it closely approximates, work a cure. The 
"divided self" may on the other hand require 
the good offices of modern psycho-therapeutics 
rather than, or in addition to, the offices of the 
clergyman. 

We saw in Chapter I how every great reli- 
gious system has its dogma of atonement and its 
dogma of the expiating death of the god. What 
was not at that time made clear is what gave 
rise to the belief that in the resurrection of the 
god the individual was "born again." 



148 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

The idea of re-birth is as old as the human 
race, and it has its inception in a definite, 
individual, unconscious biological wish. When 
Freud began to examine the Unconscious of 
certain of his patients, he discovered to his 
amazement that these neurotics, in their in- 
tense unconscious desire to escape from the 
world, actually longed to be back in the mother's 
womb, thence to issue forth in new and normal 
form. He approached this field with great 
caution; indeed, such a wish hardly seemed 
credible to him, until he had corroborated his 
first conclusions by analysis of a large number of 
persons, both by the hypnotic method and by 
psycho-analysis. The patient in hypnotic trance 
revealed the wish ; the patient who symbolized 
the wish in well-known dream symbols, revealed 
the wish when this unconscious material was 
brought up into consciousness. 

This fantasy appears in the earliest myths, 
slightly disguised in folk-tales, and in more or 
less symbolized form in dreams. Every prim- 
itive cosmology has its "Urmutter," its primitive 
mother, from whom creation sprang. In Baby- 
lonian conceptions of the beginning of things, 
the primitive mother is Tiamat, from whose 
body creation springs. In Judaism we have 
Tehom, the deep, which is also feminine and 
shows traces of a similar cosmology. Greek 
and Roman mythology have a primitive 
mother of all things, Ops or Rhea. For 



CONVERSION 149 

the primitive, the process of creation would 
naturally be similar to the biological process of 
birth in man. There is much evidence also of a 
re-birth wish in primitive myths. 

There is strong evidence for this wish in 
dreams. Pfister tells of a highly neurotic woman 
who dreamed that she passed through a slimy 
canal in a boat, and that there was a slippery, 
slimy wall, up which she climbed by the aid of 
her pastor. This was discovered to be a re- 
birth fantasy, the canal symbolizing the amnio- 
tic liquor, the climbing out the issuance of the 
infant in the act of birth, and so on. Dr. Coriat 
speaks of cases where a patient dreams of a long, 
slimy tunnel through which he passes and thence 
issues into the light. This seems so fantastic 
and incredible, not to say distasteful to most 
minds, that no one can be blamed for doubting 
the interpretation of such dreams, but this fact 
must be faced: these are not the arbitrary 
interpretations put upon fantastic dreams by the 
analyst, they are revealed by the patient him- 
self and accepted by him as the correct interpre- 
tation! 1 Where both the psycho-analytic 
method and hypnosis have been used with the 
same patient, this fact is even more strongly 
corroborated. Let us remember in this connec- 
tion the little Greek folk-song quoted on page 
67 as a self -interpreted phallic dream. 

It is definitely established, then, by modern 

1 See Appendix II, page 249. 



150 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

experimental psychology that the neurotic does 
desire this re-birth in the gross, biological sense. 
He desires it as a resolution of his inner conflict. 
The followers of Jesus were familiar with this 
wish, and one of his enemies goes so far as to 
ask whether a man can be born again in the 
biological sense. Jesus refines upon this primi- 
tive idea, he makes it the symbol of the life re- 
generated, spiritualized, refined of selfishness, 
even while he recognizes the prevalence and the 
neurotic, biological character of the wish in its 
original form. "Unless ye be born again," is 
his reiterated condition of entrance into the 
Kingdom of Heaven; man must undergo some 
process of psychic transformation ere he can 
enter into this Kingdom; what this is we shall 
strive to ascertain. 



2. The Method of Conversion 

The means of attaining to the spiritual re- 
birth are similar to those which precede the 
"mystic experience," which it closely parallels, 
the main difference being that conversion is sup- 
posed to have a permanent effect upon the 
individual's life whereas the "mystic experience" 
is for a brief instant. There is the same novi- 
tiate, or period of spiritual preparation preced- 
ing the actual experience. There is a period of 
prayer and struggle, of "wrestling with God" 
(compare the wrestling of Jacob and the angel, 



CONVERSION 151 

Genesis xxxii, 24-32), a period of deepest 
anguish when the spirit seems cut off from God ; 
then follows a period of temptation to resume 
the old life, finally, the spirit emerges into a state 
of exaltation, then into a state of peace and 
tranquillity. This psychic process is not peculiar 
to Christianity. It may even be better studied, 
since we may study it without bias, in ethnic 
religions. The Buddhist calls this experience 
"attaining enlightenment." 

In his "Light of Asia," Edwin Arnold tells how 
Siddartha, the Buddha, attained enlightenment. 
First of all, he renounced his princely station 
with all its trappings (he had been awakened to 
the pain and misery of life by the sight of 
poverty and disease) and wandered about as a 
mendicant seeking, as the neurotic seeks, the 
meaning of evil. He went and sat him down at 
the mouth of a cave, 

Subduing that fair body born for bliss 

With fast and frequent watch and search intense 

Of silent meditation. 

When he was finally prepared, he took his 
place under the sacred Bodhi-tree and there 
came to tempt him all evil powers, 

The fiends who war with Wisdom and the Light, 
Arati, Trishna, Raga, and their crew 
Of passions, horrors, ignorances, lusts, 
The brood of gloom, and dread, 

Then came the ten chief Sins : the Sin of Self, 



152 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

Doubt, False Faith or Deceit, Lust, Hate, Lust 
of Fame, Lust of Days, Pride, Self-Righteous- 
ness, Ignorance. But as the dawn broke, these 
all fled, having spent their force in vain, and 
the Buddha attained enlightenment, or freedom 
from desire. He attained that exalted state in 
which henceforth, according to legend, his fol- 
lowers knew him, and nothing could shake him 
from this state nor bring the return of his old 
self. 

In the same way is told the familiar story of 
Jesus, how he went fasting in the wilderness 
forty days and forty nights, and then came the 
Tempter and offered him the kingdoms of the 
world, but he would not, and finally, came peace 
and tranquillity and ministering angels sent from 
heaven restored his worn body to health. 

How may we account for the striking similar- 
ity of two stories of such widely different origin? 
How, except that this represents a not uncom- 
mon experience in human life? These stories 
are, in fact, highly symbolized versions of the 
struggle that goes on in the breast of the 
neurotic, only the struggle is within and not 
without. The sequence corresponds exactly: 
First something occurs to depress the normal 
psychic life — corresponding to the period of 
fasting and penance — and while the individual 
is thus depressed, he is beset by temptation — 
that is to say, his appetites, which are kept under 
control during normal periods because of the 



CONVERSION 153 

pressure brought to bear by the society in which 
he lives, but which still exist repressed in the 
Unconscious, emerge from their subterranean 
lair and assail him, so that the poor wretch 
knows not where to look for relief or release 
from these enemies. In his weakened state, the 
Unconscious gets the upper hand in the struggle 
— corresponding to the temptations of the 
Buddha and of Jesus — and assails him with its 
desires. Finally, through the sharp struggle, 
the individual abreacts his painful emotions — 
he drives the rampant demons of desire away — 
he re-lives his painful past with suitable affect, 
rids himself of vicious complexes, and emerges 
into a state of peace — the ministering angels 
of a mind at peace restore his mental health. 
Sometimes he represses his evil demons still more 
and thus obtains a temporary peace, but at 
frightful cost. 

These profound psychic changes are attended 
by a violent emotional upheaval. At a camp 
meeting, I have seen the men obsessed with "con- 
viction of sin" writhing on the ground, grimac- 
ing, and apparently suffering horribly. At the 
same meeting I saw a new-made convert, who 
had doubtless abreacted his painful emotions 
and found release from his obsessing demons and 
was now, in the excess of exultant emotion, run- 
ning around in circles shouting at the top of his 
voice that he had found salvation. These are 
no doubt crude types; nevertheless, this is the 



154 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

sort of emotional upheaval that characterizes 
conversion. Of its reality, that is, of the reality 
of some profound psychic change, there can be 
no doubt. 

I have said that all conversion experiences 
eventuate in a changed life. In the cases where 
conversion is most beneficial, the individual 
"sublimates," that is, brings the repressed 
craving up into consciousness and turns the 
energy thus released to social uses. He then 
becomes the practical, normal Christian. But 
in other cases, abreaction is not complete, the 
triumph over obsessing fears and anguish is 
but temporary, and when the initial impetus 
given the individual by his conversion experience 
is spent, he "back-slides," in which case he may 
be in even worse state than before. 

The conversion experience does not always 
have religious color. A new-found love, the 
death of a hated relative, an access of good for- 
tune, a thousand other influences, may bring 
about the longed-for re-birth or sublimation: 
any influence which breaks up the infantile fix- 
ation of which the individual was victim, de- 
stroys the vicious complex, unifies his person- 
ality, and makes him a whole man in tune with 
his God and his universe. This is the solution 
of the religious problem. 

James (Varieties, pp. ixo-iii) speaks of 
"salvation by relaxation" as the surest means of 
attaining salvation and inward peace. "Cast 



CONVERSION 155 

thy burden upon the Lord/' is the counsel given 
to the convert. Modern psycho-therapeutics 
offers similar counsel. "Give up the struggle," 
says the new psychology; "you gain nothing 
thereby, you are but adding resistance to re- 
sistance, using valuable energy and getting no- 
whither." (Coriat points out that this "casting 
the burden upon the Lord" corresponds to the 
transference of the mental anguish from the sub- 
ject to the physician in psycho-analysis, who 
may thus temporarily become a father-sub- 
stitute, and ultimately a bridge over which the 
subject passes into the world of reality and to 
mental health. Thus the "Heavenly Father" in 
conversion represents the father-complex.) 
The advice to give up the struggle is wholesome, 
for it is true that the individual gains nothing 
by prolonging the inner conflict. His shadowy 
yet potent enemy is elusive, like the Boyg in 
Ibsen's Peer Gynt, and cannot be overcome by 
such tactics. It is unquestionably true that in 
cases where conversion has been effective, it is 
where the individual whose consciousness is a 
battle-ground of opposing forces gives up the 
struggle. We saw the same phenomenon in the 
mystic experience. The exact moment or point 
in his experience when he gives up the struggle 
seems inconsequential. The essential is that he 
give it up. Just as the subject gives up his con- 
flict and transfers the painful emotions to the 
analyst, so in true conversion the convert gives 



156 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

up his burden of sin or self-reproach and "casts 
it upon the Lord." The fiercer the struggle, 
the greater the abreaction, the stronger the 
transference, and the more complete the relief 
and inner peace. It is likely that the one good 
end of the despairing struggle of the convert 
with his sins is to demonstrate beyond per- 
adventure the utter futility of the struggle, the 
uselessness of prolonging the inner conflict. 

If, then, the "struggle not availeth," shall the 
individual yield himself a victim to his baser 
appetites, go down in defeat before them, and 
live his life on a level with the beast of the field? 
Not at all; this is not the result of "conversion 
by relaxation" nor of the psycho-analytic treat- 
ment. This is the result that enemies of Freud 
have claimed for his methods, but facts do not 
bear out the truth of their contentions. Freud 
has strongly animadverted upon what he calls 
"wild analysis," that is, the analysis which ad- 
vocates and encourages sexual indulgence. The 
successful modern analyst advises that patients 
do not indulge in promiscuous sexual indul- 
gence; his aim is to make the subject a whole, 
normal, healthy man. He really raises the Un- 
conscious to a higher cultural level by his treat- 
ment, enables the subject to sublimate or turn 
the released energy to social uses, and so brings 
his life to a higher level. The moral effect of 
promiscuous sexual indulgence is always bad, 
for the subject will thus become a victim of 



CONVERSION 157 

remorse, add more resistances and eventually 
increase his moral conflict; thus his state will 
be worse in the end than in the beginning. 
The aim of both religious conversion and the 
psycho-analytic treatment is to raise the subject 
or convert to a higher moral level, resolve his 
inner conflicts whereby he wastes much time and 
valuable energy, bring him out of himself, elim- 
inate his morbid introspection, and thus make 
him a useful, social citizen, one who faces his 
life-problem and solves it not in vain imaginings 
but in reality. 1 

1 See final paragraph of Chapter VII on religious sublimation 
page 126. 



X. THE CHANGING BASIS AND OBJEC- 
TIVE OF RELIGION 

TWENTY-FIVE years ago, if a member of 
one of our Christian sects were asked to de- 
fine the main objective and purpose of religion, 
he would doubtless have replied, "The salvation 
of the individual soul, the getting right with God, 
through the great Atonement of His only-be- 
gotten Son, Jesus Christ." Similarly, the Egyp- 
tian might have replied to the same question, 
"The propitiation of the gods through the death 
and resurrection of the god Osiris." The fol- 
lower of the Dionysus Cult would have said, 
"The propitiation of the gods through the death 
and resurrection of the god Dionysus." The 
Parsee would say, "The approach to Ahura- 
Mazda through the wisdom and sacrifice 
of the sage Zarathustra." The followers of 
the Mithra Cult would have said, "The propi- 
tiation of the gods through the sacrifice of the 
Mithraic bull." The Buddhist would say, "The 
attainment of enlightenment by following the 
path which Siddartha trod." 

While such comparisons may seem invidious, 
the fact is that until the last years of the nine- 
teenth century, the main objective and purpose 

158 



BASIS AND OBJECTIVE OF RELIGION 159 

of religion seem scarcely to have changed since 
the most primitive times. The aim of the most 
enlightened of modern religious systems — the 
salvation of the individual through the expiating 
sacrifice of some being more worthy than himself 
to bear his load of sin — is strikingly similar to 
the aim of primitive religion — the propitiation 
of "whatever gods there be" through sacrifice 
and vicarious atonement. 

Until some time near the close of the last 
century, religion, which was highly individualis- 
tic, was still in a primitive stage. But the 
changes in social life wrought by many forces: 
the invention and increasing use of machinery, 
the widespread use of the printing press, which 
sent the news of the day flying over the globe, 
telegraph, telephone, improved methods of man- 
ufacture and transportation, the advance of 
science, which brought forth the theory of evolu- 
tion, a wider spread of learning through educa- 
tional institutions, an increased specialization 
of labor, which made men more interdepen- 
dent while it brought them into closer social 
contact — all of these forces, working for the 
socialization of humanity, wrought a concomi- 
tant change in religious life, changed its purpose 
and objective. 

In the days of the handicrafts, life had been 
more individualistic, each man being his own 
capitalist and his own laborer ; communities were 
separated by lack of facilities for communication 



l60 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

and transportation (until the invention of the 
steam railroads, transportation had not been im- 
proved upon since the days of Caesar); each 
community led an autonomous life. Each com- 
munity boasted but one church in Colonial days ; 
it embraced the entire community, and the 
parish was limited only by the confines of the 
community. A Calvinistic form of Congrega- 
tionalism marked the early New England 
churches. By accident of birth, the individual 
was a member of the parish; but to become a 
member of the church, he must be born again. 
He must undergo the long preparation, the trials, 
the temptations, the conviction, the probationary 
period — in a word, all the struggles and tribu- 
lations which have been discussed in the chapter 
on " Conversion," ere he could emerge a full- 
panoplied Christian knight, with his weapons of 
offence and defence against the Evil One bright 
and shining. 

Latterly the whole purpose and objective of 
religion have changed. In our highly socialized 
life, men no longer seek individual salvation of 
this sort. This is the day of what may be 
termed "applied religion/' religion adapted and 
applied to social uses and social uplift. Men 
are still conscious of inner conflict — they are 
even more acutely conscious of it as society 
makes increasing demands upon them — but 
they are no longer inclined to attribute this con- 
flict to their having been " conceived in sin," 



BASIS AND OBJECTIVE OF RELIGION l6l 

They recognize that it springs from conflict of 
the inner, primitive urge with the mandates of 
society, that it is maladjustment to their en- 
vironment. As they become enlightened, they 
come more and more to recognize the true psy- 
chic basis of this inner conflict, hence they seek 
more and more to sublimate not by the mystic 
process of conversion, so uncertain in its results, 
not through attainment of salvation through 
prayer and penance, but rather through the 
socialization of the self. The old selfish stand- 
ards will no longer avail; the Shibboleth of 
modern religion is not "God and the Self in the 
solitude," but "God, my neighbor, and myself 
in the rush and turmoil of the world, the world 
made better through the unselfish Christ spirit." 
No longer is the Christian one set apart, who, 
like the Priest and the Levite of the parable, 
gathers up the skirts of his robe as he passes 
along the dusty highway of life lest haply he be 
defiled. He is one who, in the thick of the fight, 
finds strength and respite through looking to the 
spirit that inspires all good and great deeds, by 
whatever name he may call it. 

Since these new standards have been raised 
(and this is a sad commentary on systematized 
religion), men no longer look to the Church with 
its outworn dogmas for their inspiration. The 
older doctrines of personal salvation and vicari- 
ous atonement do not appeal, neither do they 
interest the modern man. They seem to him re- 



162 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

mote, alien to his life and his life-interests. The 
workingman goes so far as to suspect that the 
Church is the tool of capital and that promises 
of future bliss are held out to him as a sop to 
divert his attention from his own immediate and 
pressing social and economic needs. 

Let us face the issue: the great proletariat and 
that large class of thinking people who cast their 
thought in modern moulds, and who feel cribbed, 
cabined, and confined by the old dogmas, 
are definitely alienated from our evangelical 
churches. They will not give nor profess alle- 
giance to a religion that expresses itself in terms 
remote from modern life, and requires that every 
adherent shall first have had some mystic experi- 
ence ere he join the company of the elect. 

From fifty to sixty per cent of the American 
people are unchurched and will have naught to 
do with churches. What does this imply? The 
decline of religion? The death of idealism? 
Not at all. Men have turned their idealism in 
other directions; they have found other outlets 
for religious aspiration and the application of 
religious principles to social life. Note with 
what avidity men, who are instinctively gregari- 
ous, join together in fraternal organizations 
which have a definite idealistic code as the basis 
of organization and what might almost be termed 
a "creed" to which their members subscribe. Al- 
most without exception, these orders require 
belief in a Supreme Being; they endeavor to 



BASIS AND OBJECTIVE OF RELIGION 163 

inculcate altruistic ideals. "God and my neigh- 
bor" might be the slogan of these orders. They 
have a ritual rich in symbolism, which, in cer- 
tain cases like that of the Masons, has been 
handed down from early times. The members 
of these fraternal orders are open-minded and 
open-hearted; their purse-strings are loosed in 
behalf of every good cause. That all of their 
members do not live up to the high ethical stand- 
ards of these orders is no valid argument against 
the efficacy of those standards, for neither do 
church members. The point is, these "get-to- 
gether societies" satisfy man's social needs, they 
present certain high standards of living, they 
gratify his desire for a rich symbolism, they mul- 
tiply his strength through cooperative effort, 
they give him an outlet for his altruistic im- 
pulses — thus they minister to his essential 
needs. 

A thousand organizations have taken over the 
work which was once that of the Church: Civic 
Leagues, social settlements, the Red Cross, as- 
sociated charities, community service of various 
sorts. The fact is, the Congregationalism of the 
Puritan signed its own death-warrant by defi- 
nitely narrowing its vision, limiting its activities, 
and attempting to eliminate that rich symbol- 
ism which is the very foundation of religion. It 
was a sporadic growth, the outcome and expres- 
sion of peculiar conditions, the flowering (if such 
a tough, hard growth may be said to flower) of 



164 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

a peculiar type of mind. It could not last; it 
was too foreign to all the natural, vital impulses 
of the human race. It sought to repress sex- 
instinct. Bare of ritual, it sought to kill man's 
social needs, repress his strongest instincts: the 
desire for love, amusement, art, literature. 
It sought to still the music of life. It began 
as a definite reaction against the pomp and 
circumstance of Anglicanism. Seeking to re- 
press natural and wholesome instincts, it was un- 
natural, it could not live. 

Behold, then, how time has vindicated the 
older, more highly symbolized types of religion. 
The sons and grandsons of men of Puritan stock 
are flocking to the Episcopal Church, where 
their inherent need of symbolism, rich and beau- 
tiful, is satisfied. In the same way the Catholic 
Churches, Greek and Roman, satisfy this need. 
But do these churches not lose their adherents? 
Yes, because the enlightened man of the twenti- 
eth century has discovered that his inner con- 
flict, his "sense of sin," is not necessarily of reli- 
gious origin, at least not in the accepted sense of 
that term. He holds that this conflict is not due 
to his alienation from God, but that it is failure 
to adapt himself to his environment, due to some 
fundamental nervous trouble that requires the 
offices of the neurologist rather than the clergy- 
man. As we have already noted, while religion 
may be of assistance in stilling the unconscious 
inner conflict, religious doubt, alienation from 



BASIS AND OBJECTIVE OF RELIGION 165* 

God, are not the fundamental cause. They are 
rather symptoms of some deep-rooted nervous 
ailment. Again, this conflict is in reality inci- 
dent to our evolution, and arises, partly at least, 
from the conflict of the primitive Unconscious 
with the moral code which the human race has 
built up in its efforts to put off the primitive and 
assume the ethical. 

In the light of modern research, we may con- 
clude that this ethical code is not a product of 
revelation but of evolution. If certain prac- 
tices are conducive to the preservation and per- 
petuation of the race, those practices are moral; 
if they are conducive to its destruction, they are 
immoral. No table of laws has been given on 
any Sinai to a waiting Moses. The only Tor ah 
we know is the Torah wrought out of human ex- 
perience with blood and tears. In the light of 
modern knowledge, the old mandates are not 
compelling; there has indeed been a "new dis- 
pensation," and the pronouncements from a 
thousand pulpits, in so far as they are built upon 
old dogmas, outworn theories of life no longer 
tenable, have not the old prophetic authority. 

While we retain the rich symbolism of older 
religions, much of the myth that clung about 
religious dogma until recent times has gone by 
the board. Modern science has given the lie to 
the primitive creation story of Judaism, the 
story of a universal flood, and similar myths and 
primitive cosmology. They have been relegated 



166 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

to the primeval abyss whence they rose: the 
abyss of primitive sex-life. Interesting as folk- 
lore, valuable as halting-places on our way to a 
higher plane of being, they have served their 
purpose and can no longer exert compelling force 
in the regulation and conduct of human life. 

Not in wonders and signs, not in revelations 
made at some far-distant day to specially fa- 
vored prophets and handed down to succeeding 
generations as a body of truth valid for all times, 
nor in the morbid and sickly doctrines of pro- 
fessional theologians (themselves the victims of 
vicious complexes), breathing miasmatic vapors 
— not in these revelations and doctrines does the 
modern man find true religion. He finds it 
rather in the heart that goes out to other hearts 
in human sympathy, in the strong, sturdy, 
healthy spirit that finds good everywhere and 
where it finds evil, stays not to repine or ex- 
coriate, but puts forth honest determined effort 
to eliminate the evil and conserve and increase 
the good. 

Finally, how may the Church save itself? If 
there is any truth in my preceding remarks, we 
have already been pointed the way. 

It must first of all recognize the true nature 
and mechanism of conversion. It must recog- 
nize that the conviction of sin is due not to a 
primal fall, but to man's unconscious motivation 
and his unconscious inner conflicts. Once it has 
recognized the nature of these conflicts, it must 



BASIS AND OBJECTIVE OF RELIGION 167 

make the conversion a complete, scientific, 
psychic process of regeneration, leaving no stone 
unturned in the endeavor to penetrate to the 
roots of the psychic disturbance. It must cease 
to preach a gospel of repression or inculcate false 
ideas of sex and its functions; it must be more 
like the gospel of Jesus, a gospel of expression 
and freedom, rather than the gospel of Paul, a 
gospel of severe repression. And it must recog- 
nize that man is normally a social being and 
that he cannot become an ascetic religious saint 
without suffering severe psychic trauma. The 
Church must get more in touch with the world 
and its varied social problems, must face present 
issues, come directly into contact with contem- 
porary life and seek to solve contemporary prob- 
lems. Thus it may regain its ancient place of 
esteem in the world. 

Some religious sects to-day, by way of getting 
in touch with contemporary life and the allevia- 
tion of its ills, have turned to the healing art as 
a means of contact and a method of regenera- 
tion. We shall discuss these in a succeeding 
chapter. 



XL METHODS OF MENTAL AND 
RELIGIOUS HEALING 

THERE is scarcely a functional disturbance 
or organic disorder known to medical 
science which is not successfully simulated by 
some hysteria. "In hysteria/' says Dr. I. H. 
Coriat {Abnormal Psychology, 2d Ed., page 
299), "we are dealing with a world in itself. 
It is the most protean of all nervous diseases, its 
symptoms are multitudinous and it can simulate 
many functional and indeed some organic dis- 
eases." Hallucinations, abnormal motor activi- 
ties such as compulsive movements of the limbs, 
twitchings, tics, and a long list of ailments too 
numerous to mention have been diagnosed as 
hysterical affections. As Pfister says, the phy- 
sician gives himself needless trouble in classify- 
ing hysterical symptoms, as a given train of 
symptoms may have a variety of causes. From a 
perusal of the literature extant upon the subject, 
we must conclude that "hysteria" is a convenient 
term for a great variety of nervous ailments 
manifested in hallucinatory activities, abnormal 
motor activities, or functional disturbances. 

A woman patient was apparently suffering 
from a tumor; the swelling could be felt, it was 

?68 



MENTAL AND RELIGIOUS HEALING 169 

indeed pronounced and the pain severe. She 
was anaesthetized preparatory to operating 
when, behold ! as the ether took effect, the swell- 
ing disappeared and the tumor vanished! What 
was the explanation? It was an hysterical 
tumor. She had heard or read of a tumor, 
or perhaps had been intimately associated with 
some one who had a tumor, and she was 
imitating it. She was, in a word, playing a 
little unconscious drama. Her fears had been 
aroused, fear created a condition of the Un- 
conscious that caused her fears to be realized 
without organic basis, and the phantom tumor 
was the result. 

It is a standing joke that a medical student in 
his first year will suffer from all the symptoms 
he reads about. 

Recently a case of phantom pregnancy was 
brought to my attention by an obstetric special- 
ist. The patient had long desired to bear a 
child. Day and night this desire was the focus 
of her attention and her desire. After a time, 
symptoms of pregnancy began to appear. 
When at length she was taken to the hospital 
for her delivery, she had all the symptoms of 
advanced pregnancy, but there was no child! 
It was well-nigh impossible to convince the 
patient that she was not parturient, so strong 
was her conviction. 

Hysteria will simulate all known cardiac dim- 
culties, from slight palpitation to angina pec- 



170 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

toris; it will ape disease of the respiratory tract 
from a simple dyspnoea to asthma. There are 
forms without number of hysterical blindness, 
hysterical paralysis, deafness, aphasia, amnesia, 
hyperesthesia, anaesthesia, and the like, which 
is simply to say that no one ever can predict 
what form a hysteria will take. These hysteri- 
cal disturbances are far more frequent than the 
real functional or organic troubles which they 
imitate. If it were not for the etiology of these 
cases, they might easily be mistaken by the most 
skilled physician for the disorders they simu- 
late. 

It will readily be seen what a fruitful field the 
hysterias present for the unscrupulous medical 
practitioner, the quack with his nostrums of 
burnt sugar and water, and likewise to mental 
healers of all shades of intelligence and all de- 
grees of efficiency. In the field of mental heal- 
ing, which aims to heal all disease, but which 
affects only the hysterias we find: mind healing, 
faith healing, mental science so-called, spiritual 
healing, the laying on of hands, New Thought, 
Christian Science, Divine Science, in short, all 
those forms of healing which operate through 
suggestion. That they accomplish much good is 
beyond question. For the most part these heal- 
ers are not aware of the mechanism and technic 
of their healing, hence their results are uneven 
and uncertain. 

Mind healing, mental science, or whatever 



MENTAL AND RELIGIOUS HEALING 171 

system attempts to heal without aid of the Di- 
vine, seeks to cure physical ills by the superior 
action of mind over matter. All bodily ills, so 
these healers claim, will yield to the paramount 
power of mind, which is able to control diseased 
matter and bring it to a state of health. Faith 
healing and the laying on of hands aim to heal 
by the same process by which Jesus and his 
disciples are said to have performed miracles of 
healing, that is through the omnipotent power of 
God to heal all diseases. The patient is ex- 
horted to have faith in the power of the Divine 
to cure all ills. Spiritualist healers do not, on 
the other hand, so far as I know, claim to cure 
all ills. There are certain ills due as they say 
to "obsession," this term being used not in the 
scientific, psychologcial sense of an obsessing 
idea, but in the sense of demon or evil spirit 
possession. These spirits, mischievous "ele- 
mentals," evil spirits, or even the spirits of de- 
parted good men strive to get back into the phy- 
sical world for the sake of renewed physical en- 
joyments by inhabiting the bodies of the living. 
This belief has a counterpart in the horrid 
superstition which pervades the lower Danube 
region that there are "vampires" or "un-dead," 
who seek to inhabit living bodies or remain "un- 
dead" by sucking human blood. Cases of 
"spirit obsession" are cured by exorcism. Chris- 
tian Science and New Thought are closely 
allied. Christian Science, a pantheistic, ideal- 



172 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

istic (in the philosophical sense) system of 
thought, ignores the reality of matter. It de- 
clares all mortal ills as unreal, they are " errors," 
they are null and void, they are manifestations 
of the Old Adam in man, or mortal mind. If 
they are pronounced unreal with sufficient em- 
phasis, they disappear into the limbo whence 
they emanated. New Thought declares that all 
is good, that man is essentially one with God 
(compare Mysticism), and therefore evil has no 
real part in his existence. 

Every one is familiar with methods of 
healing through the precious relics of saints. 
Lourdes, so realistically described by Zola in his 
novel of that name, has long been famous for its 
faith cures. Pilgrims journey to Assisi, to leave 
their crutches and their physical ills near the 
shrine of the good St. Francis. St. Anne de 
Beaupre in Quebec is another famous shrine. 

The so-called laying-on of hands has had a 
marked recrudescence in our day. A British 
Churchman has been going the rounds healing 
disease by this method. 

I am frequently asked whether I consider that 
such methods of healing are effective; and I 
reply, "Yes, tremendously effective!" But 
how do they perform miracles of healing? 
Whatever form these methods may take, they all 
depend upon one thing for their efficacy: the 
power of suggestion. The hysteric is notably 
suggestible, suggestion being at the root of his 



MENTAL AND RELIGIOUS HEALING 173 

disease. He is peculiarly amenable to these 
methods of treatment. When, as we have seen, 
his illness apes a functional or organic physical 
disturbance, the power of suggestion, if strong 
enough and applied with sufficient force over an 
extended period, may be sufficient to cure it. 

We hear of people, bed-ridden for years, with 
apparent organic disease of the spinal cord who, 
in case of fire, have sprung from their beds and 
walked out of the house. These cases must 
undoubtedly be hysterics, for if there is real 
disintegration of the motor nerves, locomotion 
is impossible. In the same way the great crowds 
who flock to Lourdes, St. Anne de Beaupre, and 
Assisi are full of hysterics; these are the cases 
which are cured and are the ones of which we 
hear. The failures do not go on record. A 
great many cases can not be reached at all by 
psychic methods of healing. 

Although certain of the practitioners men- 
tioned, notably the Christian Scientist, declare 
that faith is not necessary in order to effect a 
cure; it is likely inasmuch as these methods 
work through the power of suggestion, that faith 
is requisite. They claim to heal by the same 
power by which Jesus healed, and it is related of 
him that he could perform no miracles of healing 
in his own province because they had no faith. 

Many of these cures, while they are genuine 
cures, are not permanent. When the patient's 
faith fails, or through any means the power of 



174 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

suggestion is weakened, the patient may relapse 
into his old condition and be as bad as before. 
It may be averred of most of these methods that 
they add another mental resistance to the mind 
of a patient already suffering from too much 
resistance (these resistances are the mechanism 
by which his hysterical trouble is caused) . They 
may seem to still old conflicts, but in many cases 
they induce new ones, hence their effect is likely 
to be temporary. 

The question is often asked whether methods 
of suggestive treatment alleviate or cure real 
physical illness, and the reply is "Yes, in some 
cases." The physician tells us that we have 
a certain power of resistance to disease when in a 
good physical state (the term "resistance" is 
here used not in the psycho-analytic sense, but in 
a physical sense), that constitutionally we can 
resist the onslaught of certain diseases but have 
low powers of resistance against certain others. 
Worry, anxiety, a bad mental state, emotional 
disturbance, lower our powers of resistance. If 
the patient's mind can be put at ease, his power 
of physical resistance is increased, and his 
chances for recovery are greater. We are all 
aware that when we suffer intense pain, a bad 
toothache or headache for instance, if our atten- 
tion is distracted, we may forget the pain for 
a time. Methods of mental healing help to dis- 
tract the patient's attention from his disabilities 
and pains, they give him peace of mind by con- 



MENTAL AND RELIGIOUS HEALING 175 

vincing him that he will recover, and they are 
thus of real benefit. They help to divorce his 
consciousness, which has been dwelling upon his 
pain, from that pain and thus minimize it. A 
war correspondent, writing from Salonika, states 
that he saw an Indian soldier with his leg shot 
off, calmly smoking a cigarette by the wayside 
and seeming to suffer no pain. This may have 
been due to the natural anaesthesia which often 
follows in such cases, or it may be, as the cor- 
respondent suggests, that these Orientals have 
some means by which they can shut off pain 
from consciousness. This would seem to be 
very like the mechanism of hysteria which makes 
the patient "forget" an arm or a leg and causes 
local anaesthesia and paralysis, except that in 
the soldier's case the forgetting was voluntary 
and intentional, whereas with the hysteric it is 
involuntary and unconscious forgetting. 

I must, however, append this statement: pain 
is the distress signal of disease and it may be 
a dangerous practice to ignore it in this fashion, 
for the physical disintegration may go on until 
it is too late for proper medical or surgical at- 
tention to have effect. The war correspondent 
mentioned above, when he returned after some 
hours, reports that he found the Indian soldier 
dead. 

If mind or faith healer fail to cure cases of 
hysteria, is there no hope for the sufferer? 
There are modern methods of psychotherapy 



176 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

which diagnose the case scientifically, follow a 
scientific procedure, and relieve and in many- 
cases completely cure these troubles. They 
make no claim to employ supernatural aid in 
their methods, nor to perform miraculous cures. 
Nevertheless their record of cures is little short 
of marvelous. 

Among these methods is hypnosis. It has 
been used with great success. The Emmanuel 
Movement in Boston used to employ it exten- 
sively in medical practice. Nevertheless, its re- 
sults, like those of all suggestive methods, are 
uncertain. Undoubtedly its healing powers 
have been exaggerated by those who employ it 
professionally. Dr. Worcester (Religion and 
Medicine, page 41) states that "Charcot (the 
eminent French hypnotist) and his disciples con- 
tented themselves with hypnotizing a dozen or 
fifteen hysterical young women, and from these 
limited observations they have drawn their 
limited conclusions. According to their view 
only hysterical patients can be hypnotized." He 
goes on to say that between ninety and ninety- 
five per cent of all peoples on whom the experi- 
ment has been tried can be influenced hypnoti- 
cally. The hypnotic treatment is open to the 
same objection as other suggestive treatments: 
it adds another resistance but does not reach 
the fundamental unconscious cause of the 
trouble; its effects are therefore often only tem- 
porary. It is significant that the Emmanuel 



MENTAL AND RELIGIOUS HEALING 177 

Movement has definitely given up hypnosis in 
favor of a psycho-analytic procedure and re- 
educational methods 1 with signal success. An 
eminent neurologist of wide experience tells me 
that some of his patients who had been treated 
hypnotically by himself or other practitioners 
have come to him since for psycho-analytic treat- 
ment, when the cure, which was but temporary 
before, becomes permanent. 

Before discussing in detail this method, it is 
necessary to understand Freud's theory of hys- 

1 The Emmanuel Movement was begun in 1906, in Emmanuel 
Church, Boston, after it was definitely ascertained that such a 
project would meet with the approval of neurologists. Its aim 
was to treat nervous ills by modern methods of psycho-thera- 
peutics. Dr. James J. Putnam of Harvard gave the first ad- 
dress. The aim was not to treat physical disorders by 
psycho-therapeutic methods, but, in co-operation with physi- 
cians, to treat various functional nervous disorders. Dr. 
Worcester says in his Introduction to Religion and Medicine, 
"In the treatment of functional nervous disorders we make free 
use of moral and psychical agencies, but we do not believe in 
overtaxing these valuable aids by expecting the mind to attain 
results which can be effected more easily through physical in- 
strumentalities." The movement has had signal success in the 
treatment of hysterias and neuroses, alcoholism (which is a 
neurosis), and other functional nervous disorders. Hypnosis was 
at first used, the healers using the methods of Charcot. Of late 
years, however, Freud has pointed the way to new methods of 
psycho-therapy and hypnosis has been abandoned. "God cures 
by many means," says Dr. Worcester; this movement is there- 
fore not to be confounded with mind or faith healing methods; 
as the procedure in the Emmanuel Movement is soundly scien- 
tific. Dr. I. H. Coriat, the eminent neurologist of Boston, was 
associated with the movement for some time and wrote certain 
chapters of Religion and Medicine, 



178 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

teria. Authorities are in general agreement 
to-day that hysteria is really a species of forget- 
ting. The hysteric forgets certain painful inci- 
dents, or how normally to use an arm or a leg. 
Even in the case of normal persons, the memory 
of painful incidents is rapidly pushed out of con- 
sciousness. It seems likely, from what we know 
of the subject, that all forgetting in both normal 
and abnormal individuals is intentional. Who 
has, in his advanced years, looked back upon 
his childhood with aught but pleasurable remem- 
brances? The disagreeable incidents are for- 
gotten: the fright in the dark cellar, the thwart- 
ing of infantile desire, the quarrel that ended 
in some playmate's depriving one of a beloved 
possession, the separation from father or mother 
for awhile that resulted in intense homesickness. 
When we look back upon our youthful past, the 
pleasures loom large, the troubles dwindle. 1 We 
know that the names of beloved places and per- 
sons are readily remembered because they are 
lovingly reviewed from time to time, while 
memories of unpleasant places and disagreeable 
persons are rapidly pushed out of consciousness. 
They are, however, not really forgotten, they are 
merely submerged in the Unconscious, whence 
they emerge, as we have previously seen, not as 
concepts but as painful emotions. They create 
bad complexes. Since the instigators of these 
emotionally toned complexes are forgotten, these 

1 See Pierre Loti's Romance of a Child. 



MENTAL AND RELIGIOUS HEALING I79 

complexes may carry on an autonomous exist- 
ence and act in a pathological manner. For- 
merly, hysterias were traced to psychic trau- 
mata, or injuries, but the complex may be built 
on a whole train of incidents, it may be caused 
by an infantile fixation, where no history of defi- 
nite psychic trauma may be discovered. At any 
rate when conditions are right and there is the 
proper stimulus, the emotions that constellate in 
the bad complex, emerge and play a little 
psychic tragedy of their own. Hysterical 
phenomena are in reality little dramas which the 
Unconscious plays over and over. The individ- 
ual is not aware of the origin of the drama, for 
its motivation is hidden deep within the Uncon- 
scious. 

As Pfister points out, the hysteric symptoms 
will appear whenever circumstances similar to 
those which gave rise to the hysteria recur. 
Then the Unconscious says in effect, "Now it is 
as it was at such and such a time, when the 
unpleasant incident occurred." Thus a youth 
is afraid to go near a grave-yard at night be- 
cause once in his childhood he had been fright- 
ened in such a place. The memory of the 
fright and the attendant circumstances is 
submerged in the Unconscious, but the emotion 
persists. (It has been suggested that many of 
our instinctive dislikes go back to racial memo- 
ries which have survived in the Unconscious 
from earliest times. Thus our instinctive ab- 



l80 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

horrence of snakes may be a survival from the 
time when our arboreal ancestors were safe in 
their leafy retreats from all enemies except the 
great tree-climbing snakes that still exist in 
tropical forests. On the other hand, our abhor- 
rence of snakes may have quite another origin. 
See Pfister, Psycho-analytic Method, pp. 286- 
292.) 

It was discovered by Freud and his associates 
that when the hysteric was placed in a state of 
abstraction in which he could observe his psy- 
chic processes and the hysterical symptoms were 
strongly brought to attention, these submerged 
memories could be made to emerge into con- 
sciousness, that the patient would relive that 
part of his life when painful incidents occurred 
leading to the hysteria, with all the "affect," or 
emotional reaction that attended these incidents, 
and that once this was done, the hysterical symp- 
toms disappeared. Hypnosis was at first util- 
ized to tap the Unconscious, but later this was 
abandoned, as it was discovered that the patient 
in an abstracted state could, through a train of 
associations, bring these memories into con- 
sciousness without its aid. The element of sug- 
gestion, which is never absent from hypnosis, 
was thus almost entirely eliminated, and the pa- 
tient "abreacted," or threw off the painful emo- 
tions after he had learned their cause. There 
were certain "resistances" which had to be 
broken down before these memories could 



MENTAL AND RELIGIOUS HEALING l8l 

emerge. When this was accomplished, the pain- 
ful emotions were ''transferred" to the analyst. 
At first Freud and his associates attributed the 
cure solely to the abreaction (it was then called 
the "cathartic method" of cure), but he decided 
later that the essential things were breaking 
down the resistances which kept the painful 
memories repressed, and transferring the emo- 
tions to the analyst. 

It has been found that certain hysterical symp- 
toms will arise from a physically morbid condi- 
tion, that the physical disablity has been entirely 
cured, but the hysterical symptoms persist as 
automata, or independent psychic manifesta- 
tions which, cut off from consciousness, go on 
from nervous habit living an emotional life of 
their own. I have already cited the subject who 
suffered from a functional cardiac disorder of 
which he was entirely cured, so that no diagnos- 
tician could discover the faintest trace of func- 
tional or organic cardiac disorder. Nevertheless, 
he suffered all the palpitation, dyspnoea, and 
nervous fatigue incident to the original difficulty. 
Christian Science treatments were of no avail, 
probably because he had no faith in them. As 
we have seen, psycho-analysis wrought a per- 
manent cure. ^ 

The psycho-analytic method, which I have 
just described, seems from extended observation 
to be the only certain and permanent method of 
cure for hysterical disorders. With other meth- 



182 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

ods of healing, the symptoms are almost sure 
to return, as the fundamental thing, namely 
the unconscious origin of the difficulty, has 
not been approached. It is still there, ready 
to break forth in some moment of physical or 
psychic depression, in all its original violence. 
The psycho-analytic method, however, by re- 
moving the fundamental cause, works a perma- 
nent cure. It lays claim to no supernatural aid, 
it surrounds itself with no mystic paraphernalia; 
it is a definite, technical, scientific procedure for 
the alleviation and cure of psychic ills, based 
upon long observation and keen appraisal of 
human nature, and elaborated by a keen intelli- 
gence that is unwilling to pronounce a verdict 
until there is an overwhelming amount of ac- 
cumulated evidence. Freud was many years 
elaborating the delicate and difficult technique 
of psycho-analysis. It is not entirely new, nor 
does it claim to be. The knowledge gained 
through the more classic systems of psychology 
has been utilized as a foundation for the new 
psychology. Freud gives full credit to the work 
of his predecessors. Most sober-minded people 
fight hard against accepting Freud's theories, but 
it is significant that his sharpest critics have 
never put those theories to the test. Some of 
his strongest opponents have been won over after 
a trial of his methods. I myself have been con- 
vinced of the correctness of his theories and 
procedure only after minute observations of their 



MENTAL AND RELIGIOUS HEALING 183 

results in rendering human life healthier and 
happier and after a thorough practical test. 
The contributions of the more intelligent mind 
and faith healers to our present knowledge of 
this subject are by no means slight. They have 
helped to prepare the way, and we gratefully ac- 
knowledge our debt to them. Psycho-analysis 
itself is still in its infancy and its methods will 
doubtless be improved as time goes on. 

Logically, this chapter should end at this point. 
There are, however, certain nervous ills so de- 
structive and devastating to human happiness 
and usefulness, that I wish to discuss these a 
little more at length, more especially because the 
readers of this book may be themselves the vic- 
tims of these ills. Among the worst of the neu- 
roses are those which result in perverted sexual- 
ity or sexual anaesthesia. The former renders 
the individual desperately unhappy and makes 
him a social outcast if his disability be dis- 
covered; the latter is the basis of so-called "in- 
compatibility" and the cause of many divorces. 
(See Dr. Coriat's Abnormal Psychology, Second 
Edition, page 4i4f.) Methods of faith and 
mind-healing do not always reach these dis- 
abilities, from the simple fact that the individual, 
believing himself thoroughly abnormal, consider- 
ing himself the victim of an incurable congenital 
malady, and looking upon himself as a moral and 
social outcast, seldom reveals the true state of 
affairs to the healer nor to any other person 



184 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

whose respect he would gain and keep. The 
resistance against giving up his secret is enor- 
mous; it imposes almost insuperable obstacles 
in the way of cure. It is well known to neurol- 
ogists who have employed hypnosis in such 
cases that the homo-eroticist is almost impossible 
to hypnotize and that at best hypnosis gives but 
temporary relief. Like faith and mind healing, 
it does not reach the fundamental trouble. 
These cases are most successfully treated by 
psycho-analysis and the individual, freed from 
the repression of his evil complex (in this case 
the (Edipus-complex), becomes normal. The 
anxiety and deep depression which invariably 
accompany such disorders disappear and he goes 
about his work a free man, psychically and mor- 
ally, and able to look the world in the face. 

Again, there are the ills called "nervous break- 
down" or "nervous prostration," both of them 
convenient loose terms to cover a multitude of 
ills little understood until very recently. Nearly 
all nervous ills, from the slight neurosis which 
merely lessens the individual's efficiency, to the 
severe psychoneurosis, are classified under one 
of these two categories. Thus the term "ner- 
vous breakdown" is a euphemism, fast becoming 
transparent to every one, for men dread the term 
"insanity" as they dread "consumption" or 
"tuberculosis," preferring to say "nervous break- 
down" and "lung trouble." 

Ordinarily, "nervous breakdown" means a 



MENTAL AND RELIGIOUS HEALING 185 

profound nervous depression which incapacitates 
the individual for useful work. It is attributed 
to a variety of causes: overwork, nervous strain, 
brain fatigue, and the like. Clergymen, social 
workers, and all others, including physicians, 
whose work brings them in contact with people 
in abnormal emotional, mental, or physical 
states, are peculiarly liable to it. The clergy- 
man, like the physician, enters the home where 
fatal disease has set its seal upon the brow of 
a father or mother, or where a dearly-loved mem- 
ber of the family has just passed away. He 
gives generously of his sympathy and his 
friendly counsel. Ere he is aware, he finds his 
energies evaporating, his nervous tone lowered, 
as he thinks, by the constant drain upon his 
sympathies. His nights begin to be sleepless, he 
loses interest in his work. Finally, he has what 
is termed a "nervous breakdown," and is sent 
away to a rest-cure, the worst possible procedure 
in such cases! Men in responsible positions in 
business and professional life have these "ner- 
vous breakdowns." And always the rest-cure has 
been prescribed. 

Now these "breakdowns" are not at all what 
they seem. They are not primarily due to over- 
work or fatigue or a drain upon human sympa- 
thies. They arise from the individual's inability 
to face reality, to face issues and work out his 
life-problem. Whence comes this inability? 
From the individual's own mental conflicts, 



l86 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

which in turn date from childhood when for 
some reason there was an injurious repression 
of the sexual instinct. The sudden demand 
made upon the individual's nervous energy is but 
the exciting cause, the efficient cause is to be 
looked for in the injurious complex. Clergymen 
are peculiarly liable to such breakdowns on ac- 
count of the severe repression which is a part 
of their education. In fact, such repressions 
have often driven men into the ministry. De- 
tractors have called the clergy the "third sex," 
implying a sexlessness among them. This in the 
past may have had some justification, for the 
older type of cleric took only too well to heart 
the lessons of the neurotic Paul and fought the 
flesh as he fought the devil. We have already 
noted how repression of the sex-instinct results 
in a general depression of physical and nervous 
energy. We have seen how these repressions 
with their evil effects are caused by the conflict 
of the inner urge with the moral laws laid down 
by society. We, the people, are therefore 
largely to blame if the clergyman has so re- 
pressed all his normal instincts that he virtually 
becomes a sexless being ; we are largely to blame 
if he is the victim of consequent neuroses, and 
suffers nervous breakdown. For we have set up 
for him an impossible standard of sexlessness, 
and required that he live up to it; though he 
himself has assisted in the evil work by striving 
to pattern his life on that of the neurotic Paul. 



MENTAL AND RELIGIOUS HEALING 187 

Let us remember that even of Jesus it was said, 
"He was a man of like passions with ourselves." 
If the clergyman is to do effective work in 
religious and social fields, he must be above all 
things a normal man. A man suffering from 
repression is invariably a man physically and 
mentally below par; he can not be an energetic 
worker for religious and social causes. Let us 
rather require that the clergyman be a virile 
man, with sane and normal instincts, held under 
the control of his will, or sublimated, not the vic- 
tim of evil repressions which make his Uncon- 
scious a battle-field of erotic desire. 

Whether the celibacy of the Catholic and the 
High Anglican clergy is on the whole injurious, 
I am not in a position to state. I have known 
some cases where it was obviously so, many 
others where the good man had obviously sub- 
limated (that is, turned the energy of the crav- 
ing to social uses) and was entirely free from 
evil repression. There are thousands of men 
who live in a state of bachelorhood in secular 
life without any evil effects; sexual indulgence 
is not at all necessary to health or happiness; 
why should the clergy suffer from an odium from 
which the secular man is free? In every case, 
it would seem to depend upon the particular 
background of the individual: his heredity, his 
early family life, his relation to his parents and 
other members of his family, his early educa- 
tion, and the consequent attitude he takes 
toward life in general. 



l88 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

Of this I am assured, the Catholic confessional 
is of inestimable benefit in the assistance it 
gives the individual to abreact his painful emo- 
tions and sublimate. The effect of confession, 
when intelligently handled, is very like that of 
the cathartic method which was the beginning 
of psycho-analysis. A sympathetic priest can 
draw out the innermost thoughts of the confess- 
ant and assist him to rid his mind of oppressing 
troubles. I know of at least one case where the 
soil was fertile for the development of a homo- 
erotic neurosis (Ferenczi prefers the term 
"homo-erotic" to the term "homo-sexual," since 
the latter implies a congenital defect, whereas it 
is really an acquired neurosis), but where 
through the good offices of the confessional, the 
individual was restored to normality. This was 
a youth, an only son, petted and spoiled by an 
indulgent mother, as an only child is so likely 
to be. His mother was young enough to have 
preserved much of her youthful charm and 
beauty and was the son's inseparable companion, 
in fact these two seemed to need no other 
companionship. His father, an alcoholic, a 
periodic drinker, who would stay sober for 
a time then go on a long debauch, was the 
object of the youth's well-merited hatred since 
he had done much to devastate the home 
and the happiness of his family. At the age 
of sixteen, the boy showed decided homo- 
erotic tendencies, with other well-known symp- 



MENTAL AND RELIGIOUS HEALING 189 

toms such as anxiety states, an introverted 
personality, and the like, but as he approached 
manhood he outgrew these tendencies, fell in 
love with a beautiful girl of about his own age, 
married and lived a happy married life. A fine 
boy came to bless their union. I cannot defi- 
nitely prove that it was the confessional that 
freed this boy from his bad complex, as it is a 
well-ascertained fact that many individuals go 
through a homo-erotic period (see Romaine 
Rolland's Jean Christ ophe,) and finally break 
away from the infantile fixation that causes the 
trouble and become entirely normal without ad- 
ventitious aid. From what I know of such fixa- 
tions, however, I think it far more likely that 
when they persist through the adolescent period 
they are likely to become permanent and then 
only some psycho-therapeutic method will re- 
lieve or cure the case. In the above case, I 
attribute the cure to the catharsis furnished by 
the confessional, since the youth was a devout 
Catholic and went frequently to confession, from 
which he would return with care-free step and 
happy smile. It would be well worth the while 
of the good fathers who have youth in charge 
to look into the causes and mechanism of the 
neuroses, inasmuch as it would give them deeper 
insight into the characteristic struggles of youth 
during the storm and stress of adolescence and 
would enable them to confer untold benefits in 
the intimacy of the confessional through sympa- 



IQO RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

thetic understanding. To gain this, the confes- 
sor himself would of course have to be free from 
introversion. 

In closing, let me say that we must give all 
those psychotherapeutic methods which come 
under the head of faith or mind cure, their due, 
and recognize that in many cases they help the 
neurotic to sublimate and thus turn his libido 
to social ends. 



XII. THE RELIGIOUS PROBLEM IN 
EDUCATION 

WE have seen in the preceding chapters 
how the religious problem in its varied 
aspects is as old as the human race ; how in prim- 
itive times it involved the propitiation of adverse 
forces which the individual felt might rise up and 
destroy him; how in a more advanced state of cul- 
ture the problem became one of the resolution of 
inner conflicts; and that in either case it is a 
problem of the individual's perfect adjustment 
to his environment. In the review of this many- 
sided problem, we have seen the important role 
which the Unconscious plays in its solution. 
We have seen something of the motivation of 
human life, with its mixed egotistic and altruis- 
tic motives and have noted that there is free- 
will in human life, but that individual decisions 
are governed largely by the Unconscious. In 
our discussion of the nature and effect of 
the Unconscious, we have noted how it affects 
the problem of evil, which is really the 
problem of the individual's attitude toward 
life and the effective use of his life forces. 
We have discussed certain normal and patho- 
logical religious types: Sadistic, Masochistic, 
Mystic, and the Neurotic type that seeks in 

191 



192 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

fantastic systems satisfactions and stimuli for 
a jaded emotional appetite. We have noted the 
psychological basis of conversion. But we have 
seen that there is a changing basis of religion 
which involves something wider than individual 
satisfactions or adjustment, that the focal points 
are shifting in this twentieth century, and that 
while much of the content and many of the 
phenomena of older systems may be considered 
morbid, unwholesome, and abnormal, involving 
as they do a view of the natural life as totally 
depraved, we are getting to a highly socialized 
type of religon which exemplifies in the broadest 
sense love for our neighbor. Finally, we con- 
sidered how many modern religious systems have 
turned to the healing of physical and psychic 
ills as a practical application of religion to mod- 
ern life and have noted what success has at- 
tended their efforts in this direction. 

The various discussions may seem to have 
carried us far afield, nevertheless these various 
questions are but ramifications of the religious 
problem and all have had to do with that per- 
fect adjustment to environment without which 
no one can be said to be living a happy and 
useful life. We have definitely turned aside 
from the philosophical and metaphysical aspects 
of the problem, otherwise we should have been 
carried beyond the scope of this book. More- 
over, these have been ably and exhaustively dis- 
cussed by many modern thinkers. 



RELIGIOUS PROBLEM IN EDUCATION 193 

The final goal of religion is social unity. Even 
those writers who oppose the view that ethics 
and religion represent the struggle of the human 
race toward social unity and declare that religion 
has uses aside from, or beyond, social ends, are 
compelled to give weight to the social influences 
that determine the course of human life through 
the pressure of public opinion and give definite 
direction to the individual life. Thus, Rudolf 
Eucken (Main Currents of Modern Thought, p. 
369) declares: "A system of human culture 
founded upon the mere individual and his 
subjective condition (is) unsatisfactory. . . . 
Heredity, environment, and education not only 
determine him in innumerable ways, but seem to 
be entirely responsible for him; they spin such 
a fine web around him that neither cunning nor 
force can break through. It is certain that this 
determination reaches into that inner soul which 
individualism holds to be completely free of 
outward influences. . . . For let the individ- 
ualist assert himself against the world as much 
as he likes and seem completely to separate him- 
self from it, he still remains overshadowed and 
overpoweringly influenced by the world and sub- 
ject to its limitations." 

There is therefore no cogent reason why we 
should withdraw from our original position nor 
find just cause to restate the religious problem 
in other than social terms; especially, as we 
have given due weight to individual urge as a 



194 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

potent unconscious factor in molding human life 
and have recognized that social pressure, al- 
though the conflicts it raises with the Uncon- 
scious in the imposition of its laws may create 
grave psychic disturbance, is the potent force 
which progressively raises the human spirit to 
higher moral and religious levels. By these two 
forces the individual is molded, and while the 
conflict between them makes his life a fierce 
battle-ground in which he may acknowledge de- 
feat by flight from reality into a neurosis, they 
likewise force him to sublimation by which his 
energy is turned to social ends and finds ex- 
pression in art, music, literature, and scientific 
pursuits. Thwarted in one direction, his energy 
finds outlet in another, sometimes the fantastic 
and futile imagery of hysteria, but quite as often 
by sublimation in some valuable social work 
which helps the progress of mankind. 

To tell how the individual may be saved from 
a deadening and soul-destroying neurosis in the 
progress of this struggle and sublimate and de- 
vote his life to social altruistic ends, is the object 
of the present chapter. 



i. The Method and Effect of Psycho-analysis 

Psycho-analysis, as its name implies, is an 
"analysis of the psyche, " or personality. It is 
a definite therapeutic means of tapping the Un- 
conscious and bringing unconscious mental pro- 



RELIGIOUS PROBLEM IN EDUCATION 195 

cesses (complexes) up into the light of conscious- 
ness and thus destroying their power to harm. 
We have noted the nature and characteristics of 
the complex. Pyscho-analysis, as we have like- 
wise noted, breaks up the vicious complex, and 
remolds it for social ends. 

Freud 's original procedure in beginning an 
analysis was to place the subject in a reclining 
position on a couch, where he could be in a state 
of perfect physical relaxation that enabled his 
mind to get into that abstracted, passive condi- 
tion where he could observe his psychic processes 
unhindered by external stimuli. Pfister and oth- 
ers regard this as not altogether good, since it in- 
duces a feeling of helplessness in the subject and 
may give rise to erotic fantasies. Pfister places 
the subject in an easy chair in a semi-recumbent 
position and is himself in perfect view of the 
subject throughout the analysis. I regard this 
as the better way, since the subject's curiosity 
is aroused as to what the analyst is about if he 
is not in full view. Needless to add, the analyst 
must be so schooled as to betray no surprise or 
discomfiture at anything the subject may reveal 
in the course of the analysis, however grossly 
erotic, vindictive, vulgar, or even blasphemous 
these revelations may be. The analyst is the 
good physician, his attitude is impersonal as that 
of a skilled surgeon in the midst of a difficult 
operation; indeed, he is a kind of surgeon and 
it is his object to cut away morbid growths from 



196 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

the subject's psychic life. To accomplish this 
good end, all the evils which have been festering 
in the Unconscious must be brought to light to- 
gether with the deep anguish which they have 
caused, and the subject must abreact these fully. 
In a serious neurosis, there is a good deal of this 
sort of matter, and the success of the analysis in 
working a cure depends upon the thoroughness 
with which this matter is brought up into con- 
sciousness. 

The analyst may begin with conscious 
memories which cling to the painful complex, as 
the conscious material or rather the fore-con- 
scious material is most readily and quickly 
brought to light. In a few treatments, this 
material will be exhausted; then he will begin 
to penetrate more deeply into the recesses of the 
personality and bring forth unconscious ma- 
terial. 

As Pfister remarks, frequently, the first 
remark of a patient as the analysis begins re- 
veals the nature of the complex. He cites the 
case of a younger man suffering from the CEdi- 
pus-complex who, as he came into the room for 
his first interview, cried out excitedly, "Promise 
that you will reveal nothing of what I tell you 
to my father." A subject, when asked to give 
her earliest childhood memory immediately burst 
into tears and said, "My father — it is a very 
painful memory/ ' and went on to relate how her 
father had taken her as a very young child into 



RELIGIOUS PROBLEM IN EDUCATION 197 

a desolate spot and pretended to leave her there 
alone in the gathering twilight. She thus re- 
vealed the bad father-complex at once. After 
the first treatment she was assured that she 
would go home and sleep well that night, al- 
though the inexperienced analyst was aware that 
this suggestion was not according to the best 
analytic method. It turned out as she had been 
told; she slept better the first night after this 
violent abreaction than she had for two years 
previously. 

The analyst from the beginning of the treat- 
ment analyzes the subject's dreams. Often 
the first dream after beginning treatment is 
tremendously significant, as it usually reveals 
the subject's attitude toward analysis and 
analyst. Beginning with a dream or a dream 
fragment as a starting-point, by tactful ques- 
tioning and the reiteration of some soothing, 
stereotyped phrase, such as, "Yes, and then?" 
or "What next comes to mind?" the subject is 
induced to bring up from the vast sea of his Un- 
conscious all the painful matter which has been 
festering and wounding, together with the 
"affect," the accompanying agony and anguish 
which mark the complex from which he suffers. 
The greater the affect, or emotional reaction, the 
more successful the treatment. The analyst will 
feel at such times that he is cruel, but he con- 
soles himself with the thought that he wounds 
only to heal. 



198 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

The subject describes his dreams circumstan= 
daily; if there is some obscure point in the 
dream, he is induced to relate it again and fre- 
quently the obscure and hazy parts of the dream 
will reveal the very thing that the analyst most 
wishes to know. For it is owing to certain 
resistances (caused by the complex) which must 
be broken down that parts of the dream are sup- 
pressed and "forgotten." Sometimes a mere 
dream fragment is more significant than a more 
elaborate dream which makes a great impression 
on the patient's mind, since elaborate dreams are 
frequently mere covers or disguises to hide im- 
portant unconscious motives. 1 

Deeper and deeper, as the analysis proceeds, 
goes the probe into the Unconscious. From re- 
mote recesses matter is brought forth that the 
subject supposed to be long forgotten (it is just 
this severance of mental processes from con- 
sciousness that gives the complex its power to 
harm) and of whose very existence he was not 
consciously aware. 

After a time, the character of his unconscious 
life, manifested in symptomatic actions of a hys- 
terical nature, dreams, mental depressions and 
anxieties, undergoes a profound psychic change. 
As his resistances are broken down one by one, 

1 The "latent" content reveals the true Unconscious, rather 
than the disguised manifest content or the dream as remembered. 
See Appendix I for full explanation of "latent" and "manifest" 
contents of dreams. 



RELIGIOUS PROBLEM IN EDUCATION 199 

he abreacts all his painful emotions, the grossly- 
erotic character of his dreams changes and be- 
comes normal, and he himself becomes a well 
man, capable of taking a useful part in the 
social organism. He has transferred his pain- 
ful emotions to the analyst; finally, the analyst 
breaks off this transference and thus becomes a 
bridge over which the subject passes into reality. 
(Let no one attempt psycho-analysis in amateur 
fashion. The analyst must first of all be an- 
alyzed himself so that he knows his own re- 
sistances, this is the sine qua non. He must 
know most of the Freudian literature and learn 
the delicate technique necessary to conduct a 
successful analysis. He must likewise be ac- 
quainted with the mechanism of dreams, in itself 
a special science. Finally, he must know how 
to treat the strong positive transference of 
a successful analysis. Many an otherwise 
successful analysis has come to grief at this 
point. Many of the adverse criticisms 
of psycho-analytic methods have been based 
on these very dangers, an indirect compli- 
ment to the efficacy and power of the Freudian 
treatment. Both opponents and advocates 
warn against misuse of psycho-analysis for the 
same reason.) 

The first effect of psycho-analytic treatment 
is to free the sex-instinct or craving from its 
unnatural repression. It is likely for a time to 
well up from this strong repression with great 



200 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

force and power. This seems to be the basis 
of most of the adverse criticism of this method. 
But is the effect pernicious? Enemies of Freud 
have declared that the Unconscious is released 
in all its primordial force and that, the inhibi- 
tions due to the restraining force of society being 
broken down, the individual is driven to a life 
of license. This is not true. Whereas the Un- 
conscious is freed from the repressive influences 
of the long inner conflict, it is likewise raised 
to a higher cultural level by the treatment. If 
the individual is beset by strong primitive forces, 
he has also new strength to meet them. Even 
if there were truth in the statement, it is better 
to bring these forces up into the light where they 
may be fought face to face than to fight shadowy 
foes who lurk in darkest ambush and surprise 
the individual when he is off his guard; more- 
over, these forces in their repressed state are 
very active, causing festering wounds from which 
the individual suffers no end of pain. At any 
rate, these primitive forces were not quiescent, 
they were there, and even if repressed they lived 
an independent existence and forced their way 
into consciousness in abnormal fashion. 

In any case, this state does not last long. The 
uprush of emotions soon spends itself as the 
analysis proceeds, and the craving sinks to a nor- 
mal level. When the onslaught of primitive 
emotions has ceased, the subject is conscious of 
an altogether new and delightful sense of power 



RELIGIOUS PROBLEM IN EDUCATION 201 

and energy. He finds that he can accomplish 
prodigies of work without undue sense of fatigue. 
He is capable of prolonged attention on some 
piece of intellectual work which would have tired 
him in a short time in his old state. His mental 
forces are coordinated, they work for him not 
against him, his fragmentary mental images have 
been collected into an orderly and consecutive 
body of thought. His judgments are less biased, 
for decisions and appraisals no longer rouse a 
train of unpleasant emotions. He has been 
freed from his old conflicts, he no longer utilizes 
his energy in the futile struggle with shadowy 
foes who in his former state invariably defeated 
him in his highest purposes and finest efforts. 

The tone of his physical life is improved. 
The functional disturbances, the palpitation and 
fear, the gastro-intestinal affections, the various 
phobias which made life a burden, have dis- 
appeared. His sleep is sound and unbroken, he 
is no longer waked by terrifying nightmares or 
hysterical symptoms. He is a new man, physi- 
cally and mentally. 

The analysis has more than likely resolved 
his religious doubts. He no longer through ob- 
jectification of his own difficulties views the 
world as wholly evil. He may perceive certain 
ills in the social organism, but with his broadened 
vision and faculties unclouded by secret an- 
guished thoughts, his reaction is no longer, 
"How terrible these ills; some implacable evil 



202 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

power must be the cause against which it is futile 
to struggle!" It is rather, "Here is this world 
of mixed good and evil, on the whole good, in 
which certain ills inhere; what can I do about 
it?" That is, his reactions are no longer those 
of a static, helpless, repressed personality; 
they are dynamic, they call to action, he is anx- 
ious to do. It may be, as certain writers claim, 
that the neuroses have given birth to much that 
is very beautiful in music and art and literature ; 
we have seen something of this in previous chap- 
ters. But the neurotic wastes an unconscion- 
able amount of time and energy in idle day- 
dreams in which he sees himself a hero or a poet, 
writing symphonies, leading armies to victory, 
or addressing assembled multitudes. But he 
never gets to the point of action that will make 
his visions real. His energies are spent in futile 
revery. Some writers have gone so far as to 
refuse to give up a neurosis because it seemed 
to them artistically productive. The public is 
likely to differ from them on this point. The 
productions of the neurotic are likely to be 
flimsy, remote, and ephemeral in character. It 
is likely that in every case of artistic or literary 
talent, the output would be vastly improved were 
the neurosis cured, that, without losing any fine 
element of poetic or artistic fancy, the work 
would gain immeasurably in breadth, virility, 
compelling force, and the power of appeal. A 
youthful friend of mine who was compelled to do 



RELIGIOUS PROBLEM IN EDUCATION 203 

uncongenial work, once remarked that he would 
not take the whole manufacturing plant in which 
he worked in exchange for one of his day-dreams. 
Needless to add, these day-dreams were not pro- 
ductive of any good. 

Another friend, a public lecturer, who was 
the victim of various phobias, could never 
face an audience without fear and trembling. 
(It is likely that all stage-fright is from neu- 
rotic obsession or phobias of some sort.) His 
lectures had been upon remote literary and 
artistic subjects, for he sought in this work to 
flee from reality. After psycho-analysis, he 
found the whole tenor of his thoughts changed. 
He now brought his chosen themes into touch 
with reality; his addresses had a contemporane- 
ousness which before they had lacked. He dis- 
carded notes and found that he could address an 
audience boldly and fearlessly, that the old hesi- 
tancy of speech, due to the conflict of unbidden 
compulsive thoughts with those he wished to 
express, was entirely gone, and that, since this 
conflict was resolved, he had full control of his 
faculties and his intellectual processes, therefore 
a flood of well-chosen language issued forth 
when he rose to speak. He discovered that he 
had a consecutive body of thought upon which 
to draw at a moment's notice. A theme, when 
it had been incubated in the Unconscious (i.e., 
the Foreconscious had acted upon it), brought 
forth a profusion of ideas connected and logical, 



204 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

and produced whole series of lectures. In brief, 
he was psychically re-educated; his complexes 
were re-molded and his unconscious processes 
thus made accessible to consciousness and hence 
to his will; he was aware of his own inner 
motives; his judgments were therefore more un- 
biased and his thinking more unprejudiced and 
logical ; he had learned how to think and how to 
live. 

This individual's sex-life, which had had cer- 
tain abnormalities due to his neurosis, now took 
on a normal tone. One manifestation of this 
that somewhat surprised him was that whereas 
formerly he had read evil in the most harm- 
less friendly relations of young persons of oppo- 
site sexes, he now saw in these natural relations 
only the good and beautiful. He realized, so 
he told me, that the evil he had formerly seen in 
these things was through objectification of his 
own evil complexes. 

Thus we see that the psycho-analyzed individ- 
ual is conscious of his own motives. A brief 
auto-analysis will bring them to light. A friend 
relates that he hated letter-writing. He sat 
down one day to discover why he hated it. In 
the passive mood in which he could observe his 
own processes, he found that the thought of writ- 
ing or receiving a letter brought to mind a 
woman teacher whom he had dearly loved and 
revered at the age of twelve, doubtless as a 
mother-substitute. She had given him much 



RELIGIOUS PROBLEM IN EDUCATION 205 

good and friendly advice. When she moved 
to another city he had kept up a long corre- 
spondence with her, and had kept her letters tied 
with ribbon for a number of years. These let- 
ters he would read and re-read as a lover reads 
and re-reads epistles from his sweetheart. When, 
however, at the age of eighteen he went to the 
city where the teacher lived to take up a posi- 
tion which she had secured for him, he was un- 
happy in his work (due to his severe neurosis), 
he found that the teacher did not come up to 
his ideal, as so frequently happens when the 
neurotic makes a mother-substitute of an older 
woman, he was bitterly disappointed and de- 
stroyed the carefully preserved correspondence. 
From that time on until he was cured of his 
neurosis in his thirties, he hated letter-writing, 
because it brought the image of this teacher and 
the long correspondence to mind. Of course the 
teacher, who was a very good and intelligent 
woman, was in nowise to blame. She had taken 
a friendly interest in the lad and was surprised 
and disappointed at his vagaries, the cause of 
which she of course did not know. The friend 
takes all the blame to himself. He therefore 
recognizes the unconscious element in his preju- 
dices, also in his predilection for certain foods, 
books or persons, his love of certain places, his 
dislike of others. These are explained by 
Pfister's formula which we have noted before, 
"Now it is as it was at the time when" I ate 



206 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

that food, or read that book, or knew that per- 
son. The complex-ruled neurotic has a growing 
body of phobias for this thing and that, this 
person and that person, until at length his vicious 
complexes by a method of accretion have gath- 
ered to themselves so much material that every 
act of his daily life, every place he visits, every 
book he reads, every person he meets, give rise 
to painful emotions and ideas with painful 
emotional tone, and at length the complexes have 
comprehended everything in reality. He there- 
fore shuts out reality and lives in his self-created 
world, since the vicious complexes have fastened 
upon everything in life and reality has become 
too harsh to bear. Everything he does is ac- 
complished only with a superhuman effort of the 
will, for all the acts of daily life, even the most 
trivial, such as dressing in the morning, are 
fraught with these painful emotions. Small 
wonder that at length he shuts out reality and 
retires into solitude, either a physical solitude 
such as a monastery, or a psychic solitude, 
whence nothing will induce him to emerge. It 
is likely that most of the cases of aboulia, or loss 
of will, which are so familiar to the pathologist, 
are due to just this process of accretion in the 
complexes. It is a familiar sight to see these 
persons standing for hours on a street-corner be- 
cause they have not the will to move. They 
cannot be roused in the morning except by stern 
authoritative methods. They never finish dress- 



RELIGIOUS PROBLEM IN EDUCATION 207 

ing. If they go out to walk, they do not come 
back, but walk on and on. By the law of inertia, 
they go on forever doing what they are doing. 
Since many of these persons are otherwise 
normal, it is probable that most of them are 
suffering from severe neuroses. 

From all this needless pain and suffering the 
psycho-analyzed person is freed and permanently 
freed. The peace of mind and unity of being, 
the harmony and inner peace that in many cases 
religion or mental healing or suggestive treat- 
ment of any sort has failed to bring, come from 
the abreaction of his painful emotions and the 
resolution of his inner conflicts through the psy- 
cho-analytic treatment. 

We perceive, then, what a powerful agent for 
good psycho-analysis may be, not only in the 
hands of the professional neurologist, but in the 
hands of the clergyman and the educator. 



2. The Psycho-analytic Method Applied to 
Education 

The gravest problems of our times are those 
of secular and religious education. How to 
present religious and scientific truths in such a 
way as to make a permanent impression on the 
plastic mind of youth is indeed a problem. So 
multifarious and so divergent are the theories 
of education, so difficult a task is it, that a man 
of the ability and acumen of the late Henry 



208 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

Adams decided, according to The Education of 
Henry Adams , that after all life itself is. the 
only thing that can really educate. Unluckily, 
we cannot leave the individual to be educated 
by life — in schools he must learn something of 
the search for human knowledge and the achieve- 
ments of the human race — and even if we 
could, life is not in all its phases the best edu- 
cator. He is quite as likely to follow error as 
truth if we leave his education to the chance 
impingements or the fortuitous circumstances 
of the average life. 

On the whole, we may say that the methods 
of arbitrary authority which are so universally 
employed in education are bad. The youth 
sees in the stern and uncompromising teacher a 
father or mother substitute, especially if his par- 
ents are harsh and he is driven to find father or 
mother substitute outside the home, and will 
visit all the wrath aroused by the unintelligent 
parents upon the head of the teacher. He will 
accept the ipse dixit of such a teacher with hate 
and loathing. We are fast learning that the 
imposition of authority will not gain the desired 
ends of education. 

Our methods of education have been remark- 
able for their lack of understanding and their 
lack of insight into the processes of the child- 
mind. Instead of going to the child-mind itself 
for suggestions of educational methods, we get 
some authority, often of second rate, to write us 



RELIGIOUS PROBLEM IN EDUCATION 209 

text-books in which history, geography, arith- 
metic, are set forth in a dry-as-dust fashion, and 
then we compel the growing boy or girl to sit 
at a desk for five hours a day conning these dry- 
as-dust facts, which, so far as the child can see, 
bear no relation whatever to his own life. Oft- 
times the theories of mathematics, geography, 
history, the sciences, what not, set forth in these 
books as well-ascertained and proven facts are 
naught but exploded theories, for science, un- 
fettered by authority, goes on to new discover- 
ies and discards the outworn theories of yester- 
day, but in school-books there is little change. 
Thus in some schools it is still taught that 
thinking is a function of the brain, that a thought 
makes a track in the brain-tissue, that the more 
thinking we do, the greater the number of con- 
volutions, so that if you took the brain of let 
us say Isaac Newton and examined it after his 
death, you would find that it had many more 
convolutions than that of plain John Smith the 
farmer. Did our good teachers but know it, 
this materialistic theory, carried out to its logical 
conclusion, leads to a denial of the existence of 
the soul, immortality, God. Yet our children 
are still taught that this is absolute fact. Such 
teaching can result only in a narrow, provincial, 
prejudiced outlook on life. 

At this point, I must deal with a subject 
which I approach with some reluctance, namely 
the growing sex-life of the boy or girl. It 



210 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

is, however, necessary that we look the matter 
squarely in the face without flinching and 
discuss it without equivocation or prudery, 
since upon normal sex-life depends the whole 
future of the youthful individual. The re- 
sults of our present system are most pernicious 
during the years of adolescence. At the begin- 
ning of the adolescent period the individual 
undergoes a profound psychic change. He is 
beset by a whole host of new and unfamiliar 
sensations and emotions. When the growing 
boy, beset by new foes in the way of erotic 
fantasies, assailed by enemies which he is un- 
prepared to face, because of the withholding of 
sexual enlightenment, is forced to sit quiescent 
at a desk for hour after hour, his nose in a book 
which he loathes, the effect cannot be described 
as other than appalling. This is the period 
when the boy ought to be learning to direct his 
new energies into muscular activities, when he 
should be developing altruistic impulses, when 
his attention should begin to turn outward to 
others, not inward toward his own developing 
person, with its profound physical and psychical 
changes, its changes of structure and of func- 
tion. Sitting at his desk, the model of pro- 
priety, his fancy wanders over a host of new 
and fascinating ideas, all of which would be 
termed "obscene" by the good teacher could she 
look into his mind. Nasty boy! No, the ado- 
lescent is merely passing through a natural phase 



RELIGIOUS PROBLEM IN EDUCATION 211 

of his development. There is nothing essen- 
tially wrong in these growing sex feelings. 
There is something essentially wrong when he 
does not have them. They are the beginnings 
of his adult life. They have their uses. The 
youth is but passing from a state of savagery 
into a civilized state. He covers every out- 
house with obscene writings and pictures, which 
are nothing but the phallic symbols of our pri- 
mordial ancestors, the basis of those very sym- 
bols we retain in sublimated form in our 
churches. This must be regarded as but a pass- 
ing stage of development: a dangerous stage, 
too, since this is the time when the foundation 
of severe neuroses is laid which may dog the in- 
dividual to the grave. The normal individual 
soon lives through it. 

The normal method of education is the evo- 
lutionary method. That is to say, we cannot 
take dry facts which seem to bear no relation to 
the individual and fit them to his person like 
a ready-made coat. Each stage of development 
demands its own peculiar method of education. 
We must fit the coat to the growing youth, not 
try to squeeze him into a ready-made garment 
manufactured by the thousand in some remote 
tailoring establishment. It is astonishing that 
we have not made more of the great Froebel in 
our educational methods. He was one of the 
first to recognize that in his own life the individ- 
ual relives the experiences and development of 



212 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

the whole human race. Yet, so far, only in 
our kindergartens have we made any wide ap- 
plication of his principles. Only the psycho- 
analyst seems to have made any wide applica- 
tion of this knowledge, the cogency of which 
is beginning to be recognized by all thinkers. 

Consider the wisdom of the following from 
Froebers Mother Play: 

Is it not true, O thoughtful mother, that in all you do for and 
with your child, you are seeking one aim, returning forever to 
one central point of endeavor? This aim is the nurture of life. 
The impulse to foster life is the very core of your motherly 
being. It gives unity to your feeling, thought, and action. It 
explains why your feeling, thought, and activity rise in unison 
to meet each manifestation of life and activity in your child. 

Nothing gives you greater joy than this ebullient life, pro- 
vided that its manifestations are strong, calm, and in accord 
with the laws of nature. Unless your motherly instinct has been 
warped by habit, prejudice, or misunderstanding of itself, it 
responds at once to the movements of your child. You will 
foster his impulsive movements, exercise his strength, cultivate 
his activity, and prepare him through doing for seeing, through 
the exertion of his power for its comprehension. In a word, you 
will seek through self-activity to lead him to self-knowledge. 

Here is a whole philosophy of education in 
a few brief words. Here is the object of all true 
education, "through activity to lead him to self- 
knowledge." The child himself points the way; 
education must be a matter of unfolding per- 
sonality, of growth and development along the 
lines indicated by the growing organism, "in ac- 
cord with the laws of nature." 

That sex plays a large part in the determina- 



RELIGIOUS PROBLEM IN EDUCATION 213 

tion of the individual's career and adult life is 
just beginning to be recognized. Froebel him- 
self doubtless suffered from some sex repression. 
He tells us in his diary that his father, a pastor, 
was known for his austerity and severity. He 
saw his father going about among the people, 
rebuking them for their sins, which often were 
of a sexual nature. The growing boy was over- 
whelmed with the thought that the sex life 
caused such disintegration of human character 
and such dissonances in their lives. How beau- 
tiful was the world of nature, free from these 
conflicts, in contrast with human life! He was 
most unhappy over the situation until one day 
he was looking at the opening hazel buds, when 
his elder brother, home on a visit, enlightened 
him as to the sexual nature of plants. Now all 
was changed; he saw the things of sex not as 
something abhorrent, peculiar to the human race 
and due to sin, but as beautiful, inevitable, and 
above all, natural. 

By withholding sexual enlightenment, parents 
and teachers must bear the blame for a good 
many sexual anomalies. The period of early 
adolescence is the so-called masturbation period, 
although many individuals have begun this habit 
many years earlier. To understand this wide- 
spread practice, we must know the evolutionary 
process by which the personality grows. Dur- 
ing infancy and early childhood, the individual 
finds his satisfactions in his own person; this 



214 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

and the mother are all the world it knows, It 
is likely that its attachment to its mother is at 
first only because of self-gratification through 
the nutritive function. The child is intensely 
and inherently individualistic. One who has 
watched the play of small children will recognize 
this trait. All its thoughts and desires center 
in self. But with the beginning of adolescent 
years, the normal person turns to the world with- 
out for his satisfactions and for objects of love. 
Thus, if the boy has been addicted to mastur- 
bation, which is a symptom of auto-eroticism, 
self-love, he will outgrow this trait in due time 
if he be a normal person and will turn his atten- 
tion to the world without. His acts are at any 
rate no worse than those of the alcoholic and 
drug addict who finds satisfaction in self-stimu- 
lation or the neurotic who satisfies inner crav- 
ings in fantastic reveries. All of these acts are 
asocial and baneful in their effects. The youth 
will put his bad practices behind him and turn 
his love to her who will be his life partner if he 
develops normally. But if sexual enlighten- 
ment is withheld, or on account of bad environ- 
ment and wrong training, his infantile fixations 
persist into adult life, he will not give up the 
practice. The evil complex which keeps his 
emotional life in its child state will cause the 
practice to persist. 

It is likely that all of these pernicious prac- 
tices could be prevented if the child had a proper 



RELIGIOUS PROBLEM IN EDUCATION 215 

and normal sex education. We develop the in- 
tellects of our children, but their emotional life 
is left to run riot. The best way to cure a neu- 
rosis is to prevent it. If children were brought 
up with a normal, active, out-of-door life, were 
not made the victims of an adult lust for fond- 
ling, were taught in good season, that is in their 
early teens, the secrets of sex life, it is likely 
that they would grow up more normally and 
that none of the tendencies that lead to solitary 
vice of any sort would have opportunity to de- 
velop. There would certainly be far fewer neu- 
roses to devastate human life. 

Many a neurosis has developed because a 
youth was frightened by an over-zealous teacher, 
pastor, or relative into believing that mastur- 
bation would eventually work great physical 
harm in his life or had done so already. He 
is told that this practice will destroy the spinal 
cord, use up brain-tissue, and finally result in 
idiocy or insanity. What evil work of good and 
pious but ignorant people the neurologist has 
to undo here! What years of misery, useless- 
ness, and deepest anguish are the outcome of 
such teaching! And what years of fruitless 
effort, what incredible sums of money are spent 
by the neurotic in search of mental health! 
What anguished cries burst forth, and what sup- 
plications to the Almighty for release from this 
living death are wrung from anguished lips! 
No one but the Recording Angel can ever know 
what these badly- taught individuals suffer. 



2l6 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

The truth is, masturbation is not the cause of 
any nervous ill in itself. It is only where the 
individual has been frightened that it may be 
said in any sense even to be a contributing cause. 
Its physical results have been grossly exagger- 
ated by ignorance and avarice. It is not a cause 
at all, but a symptom. As we have seen, the 
neurotic masturbates because he has never out- 
grown the childish fixation upon himself; he is 
neurotic and auto-erotic. We must therefore 
treat fundamentals: get rid of the cause and the 
symptom along with other neurotic symptoms 
will disappear. When once the sex-instinct or 
craving is released from its bad repression, the 
resistances are broken down, and the individual 
is freed from his inner conflicts that throw him 
back upon an inner world as a relief from reality, 
and thus his gaze is turned outward — he will 
cease from all these evil practices. 

In the course of his development, the normal 
individual breaks loose from his infantile fixa- 
tions; his craving is then turned toward his life 
partner, or is sublimated and turned toward 
social ends. But in the neurotic these fixations 
persist, and then the subject must be freed by 
psycho-analytic treatment. We have seen the 
multitude of evils to which repression of the sex- 
instinct lead. And it is of little use for the neu- 
rotic to struggle for self-control; while he is in 
the neurotic state no struggle can end in anything 
but defeat, for no futile attempts at self-con- 



RELIGIOUS PROBLEM IN EDUCATION 217 

trol will serve to keep the instincts chained and 
innocuous ; they will seek some avenue of expres- 
sion, if not normal, then abnormal. The only 
efficacious method of dealing with sex-instinct 
is to free it from repression, then turn the re- 
leased energy to social ends. 

No educator should ever be allowed to train 
youth who is not an expert psychologist, who 
does not know the mental processes of youth, 
nor is not cognizant of the character and potency 
of the Unconscious in the determination of the 
individual's mode of life. It is better if he 
himself be psycho-analyzed and know his own 
strengths and weaknesses. Unless he have this 
background, he cannot understand, nor deal 
effectively and intelligently with growing youth. 
He will reward and punish because of personal 
prejudice, not from a disinterested view of the 
merits of a case, unless he knows himself and 
understands the mechanism of each individual 
consciousness with which he deals. Every 
student will present individual and peculiar 
problems; the success of his education depends 
upon the educator's comprehension of these 
problems and the methods with which he deals 
with them. 

We shall take two types of student and ques- 
tion our educator regarding them. What makes 
A bright, happy, keen, alert, and apt at his les- 
sons, active on the playground, a social leader, 
sure of his powers, capable of accomplishment, 



2l8 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

while B is morose, melancholy, self-centered, 
solitary, ill at ease, diffident, inefficient, asocial? 
Many an educator would be at a loss to answer. 
He would probably murmur something about 
" family, heredity, bad constitution," or the like. 
But unless the educator can answer this ques- 
tion intelligently, he is no educator, for he does 
not know the inner workings of his students' 
minds. A characteristic answer to the above 
question would be, "B masturbates." Just so 
— but does the educator know why? For it is 
not the cause, but the symptom of some moral 
and mental defect; more than likely perfectly 
curable. Put B through a brief psycho-analysis, 
and you will probably find that there is an effi- 
cient cause in his emotional background for 
his evil practices, and that while his defect is 
not congenital, there are evidences in his case of 
family conflict and infantile fixations not yet 
broken up. The chances are ten to one that for 
some reason he hates his father, consciously or 
unconsciously, that his father was unduly harsh, 
cruel, vicious, or dissolute, or the boy feels that 
the father is not worthy of the mother and so 
would supplant him — in any case he loathes 
the father and so suffers from the CEdipus- 
complex. This much is certain: he will never 
be happy or efficient until he is freed from his 
neurosis. Freed from its binding fetters, and 
sometimes even a brief psycho-analysis will 
accomplish this, the chances are good that the 



RELIGIOUS PROBLEM IN EDUCATION 219 

youth will be as bright, happy, keen, active, and 
social as his comrade A. No one can be happy 
or efficient who suffers from some secret, heart- 
breaking anguish. No amount of good counsel 
about the evils of his life, no amount of en- 
couragement to more strenuous effort, no moral 
guidance, no spur of any sort, will in the least 
avail, until the fundamental thing is reached and 
removed. No one can live a whole life with a 
cancerous neurotic growth eating at his heart 
and devouring his life. 

We shall have no education of youth worthy 
of the name until the springs of human action, 
the motivation of human life, and the psychic 
mechanism of the various neuroses and hyste- 
rias are thoroughly understood by educators. 



3. The Psycho-analytic Method in Religious 
Education 

If the aim of secular education is the broaden- 
ing and deepening of personality through cul- 
tivation of intellectual forces, and the enrich- 
ment of personality through creation of new 
values and wider intellectual horizons, the aim 
of religious education, as differentiated from 
secular, must be the elevation of the individual 
life through bringing it in touch with the divine, 
the inculcation of high ethical ideals, and the 
development of altruistic impulses. To be effec- 
tive, religious education must penetrate to the 



220 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

deepest recesses of the personality; it deals with 
the emotions as secular education deals with the 
intellect, that is, it must begin where secular 
education leaves off, it must profoundly affect 
and change the emotions of the individual, and 
by directing them away from egotistic and self- 
ish impulses, turn them outward and assist in 
focussing them upon other lives. "Thou shalt 
love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and 
with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This 
is the great and first commandment. And a 
second like unto it is this, Thou shalt love thy 
neighbor as thyself." (Matt, xxii, 37—39.) 
That is to say, the individual best exemplifies 
his love to God in love to his fellow. True 
religion centers in love, and he who because of 
repression cannot love normally, cannot be truly 
religious. How completely the world called 
Christian has forgotten this gospel of love is 
demonstrated in all the horrors of the great war. 
We have already seen how the individual 
inhibited in his love-life is unhappy, badly 
adjusted to his environment, out of tune with 
God and the universe. The object of religion 
should be to bring about the desired harmony. 



(a) The Bible as Fetish 

Many religious educators think of the Bible as 
a kind of fetish. They seem to feel that in 
some vague and mystic manner the mere read- 



RELIGIOUS PROBLEM IN EDUCATION 221 

ing of the Bible will work profound changes in 
individual life. The representative of a certain 
religio-social organization informed me that in 
a large factory the men had been induced by- 
one of the representatives of this society to sign 
a pledge card that they would read a chapter 
of the Bible every day. What good is to be 
accomplished by this promiscuous mechanical 
reading is a mystery. It is safe to say that no 
real good is accomplished by such methods, or 
rather lack of method. It places the Bible 
exactly on a level with the piece of bone or shell 
carried by the savage, to which some mysterious 
virtue has been transmitted by some god, so that 
it shields him from harm or gives him power over 
his enemies. It is as if, aside from its content, 
the Bible had a mysterious force for good which 
one might absorb by mere unintelligent reading. 
As a Jesuit writer has well pointed out (Rev. 
Bernard J. Otten: Does it Matter Much What I 
Believe?), not all of the truths of the Bible are 
on the surface. One must read with intelligence 
and understanding to get the underlying truths. 
As he says, inspired by the Bible, Catholic has 
persecuted Protestant, Protestant has perse- 
cuted Catholic, Gentile has persecuted Jew. 
Without a background of intelligence and 
scholarship, the meaning of the Bible is uncer- 
tain. We have seen in the case of the great 
Origen (page 121) how a misreading of the 
Scripture may lead even to self-mutilation; we 



222 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

know that a great deal of the Sadistic and 
Masochistic cruelty for which religion has been 
responsible in all the centuries of the Christian 
era has been directly inspired by a misreading of 
the Scripture. Every individual sect of Protes- 
tantism finds there justification for its own 
peculiar dogmas. 

As Father Otten goes on to say, an infallible 
book demands an infallible interpreter, else 
harm is likely to come from its inspirations as 
well as good. 

We must recognize that the Bible is not one 
book but a great body of religious literature 
extending over many centuries and that it runs 
the whole gamut of human thought and specula- 
tion, from the creation myths of Genesis to the 
highly ethical Gospel of Jesus. 

The teaching in most of our Church Schools, 
inspired by the Bible as fetish, has been stereo- 
typed and dreary enough. The pupil feels with 
reason that many of the things taught bear no 
relation whatever to his own life, or indeed to 
contemporary life in any of its aspects. Certain 
religious publishing houses announce that by 
their method of teaching, the whole Bible will be 
read and studied in a period of three or four 
years. Why should the whole Bible be studied? 
Who is interested or edified by the long catego- 
ries, the dreary length of the Torah, the monot- 
onous genealogies, the primitive pornographic 
material, except the ethnologist, the scientific 



RELIGIOUS PROBLEM IN EDUCATION 223 

researcher? How or why should children hear 
the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, involving 
the account of what happened to the stranger 
who came to Sodom with his concubine while 
Lot was resident there? If such material is used 
for teaching, what good is accomplished? 



(b) The Nature of the Bible 

The teacher must first of all know his mate- 
rial. So long as teachers are chosen for their 
piety rather than their intelligence, we shall 
continue to have little result from our religious 
training. It goes without saying that the 
teacher must unite intelligence and training to 
his piety. 

He must know his material. The Bible is 
a collection of literature: historical, pseudo- 
historical, pietistic, prophetic, poetic, apocalyp- 
tical, ethical. It stands to reason that for 
the purposes of teaching its parts are of un- 
equal merit. Many of the Old Testament 
accounts are chronicles of blood-lust and vio- 
lence. They are not available for teaching as 
preparatory to the study of Jesus' Gospel of 
love; they directly contradict it. The Psalms 
are partly utterances of a lofty religious spirit, 
partly polemics against the enemies of Israel, 
reeking of violence and vengeance. The cos- 
mological material of the early chapters of 
Genesis is nothing more or less than a series of 



224 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

sex-myths, common to all primitive religions. 
Now, if the teacher has the intelligence and 
training essential to a true knowledge of the 
nature of this great literature, he is in a position 
to make effective use of it as teaching material. 
He will successfully bridge the gap of centuries 
and demonstrate to his class how the lessons 
drawn from the Prophet Amos who came to the 
great shrine at Bethel and rebuked the Israel- 
ites because they had "sold the poor for a pair 
of shoes," may be applied to the bad conditions 
of modern society. He will show how the ques- 
tionings of Job, who marvelled at the triumphs 
of evil and the defeat of good, are the eternal 
questionings of the human heart, searching to 
find out God. If he knows his backgrounds, 
even the story of Cain and Abel, the dreams of 
Joseph, the story of David and Goliath, may 
be made to serve. The essential thing is that 
he bridge the gap between Orient and Occident, 
the primordial past and the bustling, material- 
istic present, between the modes of thought 
which belong essentially to other times and 
places and the present time, the present place. 
Thus, he will make his teaching effective. 

He must be an expert religious psychologist; 
he must know how and why universal myths 
arose, what universal human need is back of 
them. He must, like the secular educator, know 
the minds and mental processes of each of his 
pupils. He must know why they evince certain 



RELIGIOUS PROBLEM IN EDUCATION 225 

religious tendencies, why they have predilec- 
tions for one part of the Scripture more than 
another. Many of these tendencies, as we have 
seen, are due to neuroses and not to true reli- 
gious feeling and aspiration at all. The teacher 
must learn to distinguish the true from the false. 
For if an individual is driven to join the church, 
or transfer his allegiance to some other sect, and 
the basis of his decision is a neurosis, he will not 
be permanently happy nor permanently loyal in 
his new situation, because, as we have seen, the 
cause of his trouble is not really religious, it lies 
elsewhere. In this connection let it be said that 
the psycho-analytically trained teacher or pastor 
can guide his pupil through the tortuous mazes 
of religious doubt and fear, help him resolve his 
conflicts, and bring him to sublimation in a true 
conversion. In that case, the preceptor will 
make the individual permanently happy, moral, 
and efficient. 

The teacher must, however, guard strictly 
against giving moral counsel before the pupil is 
prepared for this. If the pupiPs inner conflicts 
are not resolved, the teacher will be but striking 
his head against a stone wall. The pupil will 
remain impervious until he is in a condition of 
freedom from his psychic bonds. If a man be 
drowning, the sensible person would get him safe 
to dry land ere he gave him good advice. So 
with religious training; the drowning person 
must be saved from the engulfing flood of his 



226 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

neurosis. Then he will receive religious counsel 
with willing heart and mind. 



(c) The Symbolism of Religion 

In our first chapter, we saw something of the 
wide prevalence and efficacy of the religious 
symbol. "Schleiermacher," says Pfister {Psycho- 
analytic Method, page 275), "even considers 
religion the product of symbolizing activity." 
It is true, the fantasies of religion are all ex- 
pressed in symbols. Our normal e very-day life 
is expressed in symbols; we cannot speak a word 
nor express a thought without using a symbol. 
The etymology of words in common use shows 
how a literal meaning becomes a symbolic as 
time passes. Thus the word "concept," used so 
frequently in these chapters, is from the Latin 
concipio, which in turn is from cum, together 
and capio, to take. Through the elaboration 
and symbolism wrought by the passage of the 
race into a higher state of culture, spatial terms 
thus become temporal. 

The intelligent religious educator may make 
wide application of this principle. It is through 
symbolism that religion gains an effective hold 
on human life. The content and concepts of 
religion may change through changing centuries, 
but its symbolism remains. The story of David 
and Goliath may be symbolized to mean the 
struggle of truth against the encamped hosts of 



RELIGIOUS PROBLEM IN EDUCATION 227 

evil ; the story of Gideon and the broken pitchers 
may be used to illustrate the inherent cowardice 
of the evilly-motivated person; the parables are 
already symbolized, and their application to 
modern life may be made in almost endless ways. 
However, violence must never be done to the 
text in making these modern applications, as was 
so frequently the case with an older exegesis. 
The pupil must comprehend the true nature and 
basis of the myth; he must be taught the mech- 
anism by which primitive myths are created 
and gain wide credence. The instruction must 
be free from the slightest element of deceit ; the 
pupil will be quick to penetrate the sophistry of 
the teacher and will lose all respect for him. He 
wants to know the truth, and it should be told 
him so far as the teacher is able to tell it. These 
stories gain rather than lose by a full knowledge 
of their origin. Their power of universal appeal 
lies in the very nature of their origin and sym- 
bolic elaboration. 

Symbols are pictures, therefore more easily 
grasped and comprehended than concepts; the 
symbol has an emotional appeal which the scien- 
tifically expressed concept lacks. The symbol 
is subject to a wide variety of interpretation, it 
therefore appeals to widely diversified types of 
mind. 

The myths of the Bible might very well form 
the basis for sex-instruction for the adolescent. 
They are rich in this material, and certainly if 



228 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

we teach those parts of the Bible which deal 
with these matters, we should enlighten the mind 
of youth as to their real meaning, not seek to 
gloss over and escape to what seems to the 
prudish mind more wholesome portions of the 
Scripture. I have distinct recollections of a 
young lady teacher who read Ephesians v. 5 to 
her class, of which I was a youthful member, 
and, ignoring our questions, went on to the rest 
of the Sunday School lesson without further 
comment. An excellent opportunity was missed 
for sexual enlightenment. It was not of course 
the place of this young lady to speak of such 
things; the conclusion would seem to be, there- 
fore, that a class of adolescent boys should have 
a man-teacher who is free from prudery and 
from injurious fixations. Parents who them- 
selves suffer from infantile fixations will invari- 
ably object to a frank discussion of such matters 
in the public school or the Church School, and 
this will make the religious educator's task diffi- 
cult. It is but fair to say, however, that there 
is an increasing number of parents who are only 
too glad to have their children enlightened in 
matters of sex, if only some one else will do it. 

Our Church Schools suffer appallingly from 
lack of good teachers. As we have seen, piety is 
likely to be the criterion of the teacher's fitness, 
rather than intelligence, though he cannot well 
afford to dispense with either. The teacher of- 
ten has not had the benefit of a good secular 



RELIGIOUS PROBLEM IN EDUCATION 229 

education. But if he is recht in Glauben, cor- 
rect in belief, as an old German play has it, he 
is accepted as competent. Many religious teach- 
ers are those who have definitely shut out of 
their lives all that is bright and wholesome, 
and, driven into religion by severe neurosis, 
they focus their attention upon a narrow reli- 
gious field of thought. In this class we find 
men and women who have never opened the 
pages of a classic, have never set foot inside a 
theater, never heard a scientific lecture nor read 
a scientific book, nor mixed with a wide variety 
of human types. Quite commonly, they are 
typical shut-in personalities. Until we get a 
better and more intelligent type of teacher, our 
Church Schools will continue to languish and 
our religious education fail to be effective. 

4. The Object of Education 
Youth is essentially idealistic; it looks out 
with glowing eyes upon a world of infinite pos- 
sibility and rosy promise. To its pulsing energy 
no task seems too difficult, no obstacle seems 
insurmountable. The future stretches before it 
as a highway of pleasant accomplishment and 
successful attainment. 

Youth, we say, is bound to be disillusioned. 
Nevertheless, it is precisely our task to catch 
this energy and optimism before it takes flight, 
and so mold it and direct it that the individual 
lives a normal, happy, efficient life. 



230 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY 

The older methods of education took the 
youth with all this energy and optimism and 
sought by every known means to repress them, 
and by killing all initiative and individuality, 
turn out educated men and women who might all 
have been run in one mold. 

But, latterly, we are seeing the light. We 
are seeing that these old methods are not edu- 
cation at all, that they kill the energy necessary 
to the individual's success and happiness. We 
realize to-day that the object of education must 
be the unfolding of the personality along the 
lines indicated by individual gifts, capabilities, 
and predilections and the enrichment of the in- 
dividual life. In the next place, and this logi- 
cally follows from the first object, its object is 
to equip the individual to live an active, useful, 
effective life in the world into which he is thrown. 
In former times, when education was limited 
to the few, its object was to turn out the scholar 
and the gentleman, rather than the useful citi- 
zen, and apparently it mattered not whether it 
fitted him for useful citizenship. 

To-day, we recognize that no man is truly 
educated unless he is well equipped to fight life's 
battles and endure its hard knocks with courage 
and fortitude. It is his function not alone to 
ornament society but to serve it. In so far as he 
serves social needs, in however humble a capac- 
ity, he performs a useful function, makes a real 
and valuable contribution to society, and so 



RELIGIOUS PROBLEM IN EDUCATION 231 

furthers its progress. To this end, he must be 
complete master of his faculties, physically 
strong, mentally sound and whole. He must be 
mens sana in cor pore sano. 



APPENDIX I 
DREAMS AND DREAM MECHANISMS 

EVERY one who attempts to recount a dream 
has the feeling that much of what occurred 
in the dream has escaped him. This may be 
true in some degree, for most dreams, unless they 
are set down in writing immediately upon wak- 
ing, are quickly repressed into the Unconscious. 
The function of the dream is primarily to pro- 
tect the sleeper so that he will get his due amount 
of recuperative sleep. It is demonstrated be- 
yond peradventure that the dream is a wish-ful- 
filment. Every dream when analyzed shows this 
element, even the nightmare or anxiety dream. 
By fulfilling the wish of the dreamer, the dream 
guards his sleep. The sleeper may be thirsty, 
for instance. He dreams that he drinks from a 
cool stream, his wish is thus fulfilled, and he 
sleeps calmly on. Sometimes in anxiety dreams 
we have the feeling that it is only a dream any- 
way and we sleep peacefully on. The dream 
contains thoughts that would disturb us if al- 
lowed to come into consciousness. Therefore, 
what we call the "censor" which guards our 
psychic life symbolizes the material so that we 
shall not recognize it as disturbing psychic ma- 

233 



234 APPENDIX I 

terial and thus effectually disguises it, or else 
tells us that it is only a dream anyway, then we 
have the "dream within a dream." Inasmuch 
as the dream may contain unpleasant thoughts, 
we quickly forget it upon awakening, and it 
sinks into the Unconscious. This is the reason 
for the quick forgetting. 

The dream contains what Freud calls the 
"manifest content" and the "latent content." 
The manifest content is the imagery which ac- 
tually appears in the dream. Thus the dream 
about the elevator which took the form of a 
"little white house," related on page 65, has cer- 
tain dream-pictures: the large building, the high 
platform, the little house, the stout man. This 
is the manifest content. But back of this, as we 
saw in the dreamer's analysis of the dream, there 
are certain thoughts and wishes which belonged 
to the thinking processes of the preceding day. 
In this connection it may be stated that dreams 
always deal with recent psychic material, but 
they are likewise "overdetermined," that is, they 
also contain wish-material which survives from 
childhood, they have likewise sex-material. The 
elevator dream had such material, which I do not 
care to discuss in this place. Suffice it to say, 
such material existed. This material we call the 
"latent material." It is the cause of the dream. 
There are layers of consciousness, beginning with 
the upper layers of the Foreconscious, which lie 
between the Conscious and the Unconscious, 



DREAMS AND DREAM MECHANISMS 235 

reaching down into the remotest recesses of 
the Unconscious. The dream, in symbolic form, 
will contain psychic material from each of these 
layers. The remotest reaches of the Uncon- 
scious are very difficult to explore, the resistance 
which the individual sets up against such ex- 
ploration is too great The events of the 
twenty-four or forty-eight hours preceding the 
night of the dream are the "instigators" or im- 
mediate causes of the dream. In repressions 
caused, as we have seen, by infantile fixations, 
organ inferiorities, unpleasant experiences, lie 
the primary or efficient cause of the dream. It 
is only after an analysis penetrates the deeper 
recesses of the Unconscious that these appear. 

We have here another cause for our apparent 
forgetting of the dream. The feeling that there 
is much of the dream that escapes us in the re- 
counting is due in large measure to a feeling that 
there is more of it than appears in its actual 
imagery. This "more" is the latent dream ma- 
terial. It exists in consciousness as a kind of 
shadowy background of the actual dream. We 
feel there were many more happenings in the 
dream than we are able to tell, but they re- 
fuse to come to consciousness. This is on 
account of strong resistances which force this 
material down into the Unconscious and keep it 
repressed. 

In the actual dream we usually have a good 
deal of condensation. One figure may repre- 



236 APPENDIX I 

sent several persons and have some characteris- 
tics of each. Dr. Coriat (Meaning of Dreams) 
reports the dream of a physician in which he saw 
a colleague with light, silky hair, although his 
colleague's hair was dark (page 28f.). This 
light silky hair really belonged to some boys 
whom the dreamer had seen on the previous day. 
He desired his colleague to have the healthy ap- 
pearance of these boys, therefore in the dream he 
gives him the light silky hair which they had. 
I dreamed of a person who admitted me to the 
house of a friend. The figure seemed to vibrate, 
now appearing to be the friend's wife, again 
seeming to be his secretary. A woman dreamed 
that she saw a strange bird with a human head. 
It looked a little like one of Dlirer's apostles (St. 
Paul), it reminded her of Diirer and of a lec- 
turer who had given an illustrated lecture on 
Diirer some years before. Thus the face stands 
for the apostle, Diirer, and the lecturer. This 
phenomenon appears frequently in dreams. 
Sometimes a person will appear as two persons 
in the dream. This "reinforcement" is due to 
the strength of the actual person's image in the 
Unconscious. If the dreamer suffers from the 
(Edipus-complex, the mother image will fre- 
quently appear as two or more persons, or sev- 
eral persons will each show some of her 
characteristics. The strength of the fixation 
and its potent influence upon the dreamer's 
psychic life are responsible for this. 



DREAMS AND DREAM MECHANISMS 237 

Nearly every one has had the feeling that 
when he recounts a dream he is adding material 
to that of the actual dream. This we call the 
"elaboration of the dream." The tendency of 
the intellect is to react upon the dream material 
and strive to bind it up into a connected whole, 
make a coherent narrative of its fragmentary 
imagery. We have to allow for this in our an- 
alysis of dreams, but inasmuch as the subject 
can only relate what is in his mind, it makes 
little difference how he may elaborate the dream 
material. The same causes that are active in 
the dream help to produce the elaboration. So 
true is this, that subjects who claim they never 
dream, are asked to "make up" dreams. These 
artificial dreams have the same characteristics 
as the real dream. A subject was asked to pro- 
duce an artificial dream. It was as follows: "I 
stand upon a rainbow and wear a gown that has 
the colors of the spectrum, with the violet tints 
at the bottom and the red tints at the top. I 
slide down the rainbow into the water." The 
subject had seen a rainbow on the previous day. 
She confessed that she desired some beautiful 
new gowns. The sliding down into the water 
was doubtless a desire for parturition, although 
the analysis did not go so far. From examples 
given by Freud, Pfister, Coriat, and others, I 
consider this to be the case. The sliding down 
is likely to symbolize the sexual act; the waters 
are probably the amniotic liquor which appears 
so frequently in the dreams of women. 



238 APPENDIX I 

Another characteristic of the dream is "dis- 
placement." A finger may stand for a phallus, 
the mouth for a feminine sex organ. This seems 
incredible, but analysis of many dreams bears 
it out. It is held by most authorities that the 
sex function first appears in the child as the 
nutritive function. I have quoted Freud on 
page 7, note, as saying that the "sexual pre- 
sentation complex (in dreams) is transposed to 
the eating-complex." The displacement in the 
dream is similar to the word-displacement which 
is the basis of so many witticisms. Thus in 
"Alice in Wonderland," Alice is told that the 
pupils in the under-water school study "reeling, 
writhing, and drawling," instead of "reading, 
writing, and drawing." The phenomenon is 
familiar in errors in speech of every-day life. 
The classic story of the man dining with a 
miserly friend whose table was notable for the 
meager array of food and who remarked, "There 
is one thing about Roosevelt, he always gives a 
man a square meal," when he meant to say 
"a square deal," is well known. As in this case, 
the results are often ludicrous. In daily life 
these speech-errors arise from the conflict be- 
tween what is really in a man's thoughts and 
what he wants to say. The public speaker will 
proceed fluently with his address up to a certain 
point, then he will begin to stammer and hesi- 
tate. Something else is in the background of 
consciousness striving for expression. We often 



DREAMS AND DREAM MECHANISMS 239 

feel in our every-day associations that a man is 
lying when he hesitates in his speech; for we 
know that he is thinking one thing and saying 
another. Sometimes the hesitation or speech- 
error is due to an unconscious conflict; the man 
may be telling the truth, but some repressed 
thought or idea strives for utterance, interferes 
with his utterance and causes stammering. Al- 
though this does not seem to be a serious dis- 
order, analysts know that it is a most difficult 
disorder to cure. Coriat (Meaning of Dreams, 
pp. 172—173) says: "Stammering, also, is fre- 
quently a symbol of an unconscious mental 
process, the speech defect arising in an effort 
to conceal a repressed thought or idea, often 
an idea of an unpleasant or shameful nature 
which continually tends to obtrude itself in 
consciousness. Like a slip of the tongue, stam- 
mering is not accidental, but is motivated or 
caused by an unconscious mental process of 
which the sufferer is unaware." He says further 
(Abnormal Psychology, Second Edition, p. 381), 
"This speech disturbance is one of the protean 
forms of an anxiety neurosis." 

I have spoken of the "symbolism" of dreams, 
especially of typical symbols: the serpent, etc., 
and it might appear that these are arbitrary; 
that every symbol appearing in any dream what- 
soever must have a given meaning regardless of 
the age, sex, character of the dreamer, circum- 
stances of his life, causes of the dream, mental 



240 APPENDIX I 

state at the time he dreamed the dream, and the 
like. This is of course not true. By the very 
mechanisms we have discussed: condensation, 
reinforcement, latent and manifest material, the 
censorship which changes the latent material to 
manifest material, and, in general, the symboli- 
zation process, it must be evident to the 
reader that no symbol can be assigned an arbi- 
trary meaning. This would be to degrade the 
whole analysis to the level of charlatanry and 
make it one with the pseudo-science of astrology. 
Dream-books are based upon an arbitrary inter- 
pretation of dream symbols. A symbol may be 
masculine or feminine according to where and 
how it appears in the dream. It may have one 
of a thousand different meanings. It must here 
be emphasized that the interpretation of dreams 
and neurotic symptoms must be understood, as 
Adler says (Ueber den Nervosen Charakter, 
page 4), "through the testimony of the only per- 
son who is in a position to testify, namely, the 
patient himself.' ' The interpretation of sym- 
bols is not arbitrary, then, but comes to light 
during the dream-analysis from the conscious 
evidence of the subject himself. Thus we see 
that the same image in different dreams may 
have many different meanings and we are at 
once rid of the reproach which so many have 
brought against the Freudian psychology, that 
the interpretation of symbols is arbitrary, or 
that one symbol is stretched and warped to 



DREAMS AND DREAM MECHANISMS 241 

mean almost anything. The patient himself 
gives the meaning. To be sure, there are typi- 
cal dreams. If, let us say, a thousand persons 
had the typical " flying dream," and each 
of these was found to have the same 
or similar latent content, a very good case 
might be made out for the flying dream 
as typical of certain mental processes, the same 
in every case. Our judgment here must rest 
upon an empiric basis, as most judgments do in 
medical practice, whether it be psycho-therapeu- 
tics or surgery or what-not. They must all rest 
upon experience. 

Let me here develop further the conception 
of dreams as representing repressed desires. 
The Unconscious of the child is not sharply dif- 
ferentiated from his Conscious. His dreams are 
therefore direct, unelaborated wish-fulfilments. 
The piece of cake or the fruit he was denied 
during the day, he will dream of at night and 
eat the same in his dream. The excursion he 
was denied during the day (see Freud's Inter- 
pretation of Dreams, p. 107 f.) will appear in 
his dream the following night. The dreams of 
adults are seldom so obvious as this in their 
expression of wish-fulfilment. I can, however, 
cite at least one case where it was just as evi- 
dent. A young man who was very fond of 
dining out and dissipated a good deal of his 
time and energy in this pleasant but useless pas- 
time related to me: "I have this dream again 



242 APPENDIX I 

and again. I dream that some one calls me on 
the telephone in my apartment and invites me 
to come down town and dine with him at Sher- 
ry's or Delmonico's. I can not see any wish 
expressed in the dream (!) but I have it fre- 
quently." The wish-element is often so dis- 
guised and symbolized that it takes a keen 
analyst to discover it. Thus the meaning of 
the dream of the elevator in the form of a little 
house had the wish element but not obviously 
expressed. Even anxiety dreams have the wish 
element. They show the subject's preference 
for an anxiety dream rather than face his hard 
life-problem and solve it. As all neuroses are 
a flight from reality, so the anxiety dream means 
"I would rather suffer the mental torture of a 
nightmare than face reality." This may be hard 
to prove, but it is so. The dreams of those 
suffering from sexual repressions are full of 
phallic symbols. I cannot cite examples of this 
without betraying confidences, but I will simply 
point to the brief dream-poem from the Greek 
given on page 67, in which the lovelorn girl, 
suffering from repression on account of having 
no lover, dreams of a "tower of gold and 
ivory." * Subjects sometimes dream of a land- 

1 Cf. "Song of Solomon" iv, 4: "Thy neck is like the tower of 
David builded with turrets," also the two dreams related in 
iii, 1-5 and v, 2-7, the first of which shows the wish-fulfilment 
and the second the repressed love desire turned to anxiety: "The 
watchmen smote me, they wounded me . . . the keepers of the 



DREAMS AND DREAM MECHANISMS 243 

scape covered with such towers. Fortunately, 
in the poem, the girl herself gives the interpre- 
tation, and therefore it is unmistakably a mascu- 
line symbol, a phallic symbol, in fact. She 
admits that the dream is a wish-fulfilment, for 
she declares that in her husband's arms, "she will 
dream no dreams/' obviously, because the wish 
is fulfilled in real life. 

Latent dream material is often of a very un- 
pleasant nature. Therefore the "censor" or re- 
sistance, which looks after our psychic life and 
strives to keep it from disturbances, allows this 
material to pass through the Foreconscious into 
the Conscious only in symbolized form. In 
neurotic subjects, the censor is sometimes off 
duty, he is caught napping, and allows the un- 
pleasant repressed material to pass into the 
dream unchanged. Patients suffering from anxi- 
ety hysterias will frequently have such disturb- 
ing dreams at the moment of falling asleep. 
This is because the censor is inactive. 

Many subjects will relate what they call "pro- 
phetic dreams." They dream of an event and 
it occurs. This is either coincidence, or because 
it might have been foreseen that the event would 
occur, the subject wished it and brought it about, 
or because the subject has elaborated a vague 

walls took away my mantle from me" (a defloration symbol, 
cf. myths of shepherds stealing the veils of bathing nymphs, etc., 
also the form of incest prohibitions in Lev. xviii, "thou shalt not 
uncover thy father's nakedness") . 



244 APPENDIX I 

dream through conscious mental processes to 
make its event coincide with events that oc- 
curred later. Compare with this the prophecies 
of the automatic writer related on page 137, also 
the prophetic books of the Scriptures like Daniel, 
which were written after the events related ac- 
tually occurred. A subject will dream of a vague 
figure which might be almost any person and in 
the dream see this person disappear and a rush- 
ing train take its place. The next day he will 
learn that so-and-so was killed by a train. He 
will immediately connect the dream with the 
occurrence and give a circumstantial account of 
how in a dream he saw so-and-so run over by a 
train. Most prophetic dreams have just as 
slight foundation as this. They are not to be 
trusted, any more than any prophecy related 
after the occurrence of the event. The highly 
figurative language of the Apocalypse is taken 
by certain sects to prefigure the second advent 
of Christ. It might mean almost anything else. 
Unfortunately the writer is not present to sub- 
mit to analysis and tell posterity what he really 
did mean by his bad mixture of Greek and 
Hebrew idioms and language. It is probably an 
old Hebrew document worked over by a later 
Christian hand. 

There is one sort of prophetic dream to which 
significance has been attached. This is the anx- 
iety dream caused by organic disturbance. 
Freud {Interpretation of Dreams, p. 27 f.) cites 



DREAMS AND DREAM MECHANISMS 245 

cases of organic disturbance which gave rise to 
anxiety dreams. An incipient cardiac disorder, 
he states, may give rise to an anxiety dream from 
which the patient wakes in nervous terror. 
Coriat {Meaning of Dreams , p. 145) and others 
justly remark that such dreams are of little use 
for diagnosis of physical disorders, since the 
same symptoms are produced by hysterical dis- 
orders without organic basis. Let no one, there- 
fore, who has nocturnal dyspnoea or palpitation, 
or nightmares of various sorts, think he is imme- 
diately going into a decline. I know of a sub- 
ject who suffered from such disturbances for 
years without any physical deterioration. The 
origin of these dreams in his case was purely 
hysterical. 

I may therefore conclude this appendix with 
the statement that prophetic dreams are not of 
the least value in foretelling the future. 



APPENDIX II 
BIRTH DREAMS 

IN our exploration of myth and folk-lore, we 
are struck with the fact that certain types of 
legend and myth recur again and again. There 
is the tale of the prince, for instance, set down 
by the genie in a half-clothed state before the 
gate of a strange city. This we saw (page 8) 
was analogous with the dream of nakedness 
which nearly every one has experienced. We 
noted that the myth is the dream of a whole 
people, it is the individual dream projected upon 
the nation. In this connection, we noted the 
sex-imagery which occurs in every primitive cos- 
mology. On the same basis, we may explain 
the arbitrary gender of the names of inanimate 
things in many languages. It is not chance 
that makes the word "heaven" (der Himmel) 
masculine in German, and "earth" (die Erde) 
feminine. To the ancients, the sky seemed a 
bowl that embraced the earth; it was thought 
by early peoples that the sky, or the sun, im- 
pregnated the earth and caused it to bring forth 
fruit. The poet has taken full advantage of 
this arbitrary gender. Von Eichendorf, in his 
poem "Mondnacht," which Schumann set to 

247 



248 APPENDIX II 

music, takes advantage of the arbitrary gender 
to create the beautiful image of the heaven 
(masculine) bending over to kiss the earth (fem- 
inine), an image entirely untranslatable into 
English. "Es war als hatt der Himmel die Erde 
still gekiisst" (It was as though the heavens 
had silently kissed the earth). 

All of these conceptions root in early myths. 
A circumstance that we frequently encounter in 
myths of all races is the descent of the hero 
into an underground passage, tunnel, or cavern/ 
That gold-mine of folk-lore, The Arabian Nights, 
has countless tales that recount such an adven- 
ture. Ali Baba descends into the cave where 
the forty thieves have hidden their treasure; 
the Kalendar Prince, after the fall of the brazen 
statue from the island mountain, descends into 
a cavern, where he finds the prince hidden whom 
he is fated to slay; Alladin, through the agency 
of the lamp, opens the underground cavern and 
discovers hidden treasure. Modern mystery 
tales deal with the underground, whether it be 
a tunnel connecting an old castle with the sea- 
shore, or a tunnel leading through the heart of 
the earth, or a coal-hole down which the detec- 
tive follows the villain. These underground 
passages, tunnels, and caverns have a mysterious 
glamour for which it is hard to account unless we 
know the origin of such tales. 

We have but to remember that to the ancients 

1 For instance, the Orpheus myth. 



BIRTH DREAMS 249 

the earth was the mother of all things to get 
light on the subject. "The bowels of the earth," 
"the womb of the earth," are figures of speech 
encountered frequently in both ancient and 
modern literature. We have seen that primal 
creation myths are a projection of the individ- 
ual birth story upon the cosmos, an objectifi- 
cation and enlargement of individual experience 
to embrace creation. Inasmuch as we are now 
familiar with the origin and mechanism of 
dreams, it is but a step (in fact, the only logical 
step) to a realization that the dream of the 
individual of passing down into a cavern, 
through a tunnel, or into some subterranean 
passage, which at length leads upward (usually 
obliquely upward) to the light, is a dream based 
on the memory of his own birth. This some- 
what startling fact was made clear to Freud in 
the analysis of many such dreams; to Pfister, 
who recounts a number of them in his Psy- 
choanalytic Method, and to Coriat, whose ex- 
perience is very broad. Jung, Adler, and Brill 
are also familiar with this phenomenon. 

These dreams are strikingly similar. There 
is often a descent into water (the amniotic 
liquor), then a passage into some sort of dark 
cavern (the uterus); then a feeling of being 
pushed forward from behind (as in actual 
birth); the movement obliquely upward (as 
through the vagina) to the light. There is 
frequently a great fear felt in this exit of the 



250 APPENDIX II 

dreamer to the light. The child first knows 
fear when it emerges from the warm security 
of the uterus into the light of day. It is no 
longer protected, safe and warm in the mother's 
body. It has become an independent being, an 
individual thrust into life, to sink or swim, sur- 
vive or perish. Many neuroses which demon- 
strate the shut-in or introversion tendency, with 
certain hysterical symptoms, really mean that 
the individual would like to return to the dark, 
warm security of the mother's body; thence, 
to be born again a whole man. We have al- 
ready seen that Jesus was aware of this un- 
conscious desire so common among mankind, 
and idealized it into the conception of being 
re-born and entering the Kingdom of Heaven. 

The most striking birth dream that I have 
encountered is the under-water dream of the 
Dakotan, recounted in Will Levington Comfort's 
Child and Country (pp. 321-329). I do not 
know whether Mr. Comfort is familiar with 
Freud and the theories and procedure of psycho- 
analysis. If he is, I should suspect him of 
"tampering with the evidence," this dream is 
so complete and its interpretation so true to 
form. I shall assume, however, that the dream 
is recounted actually as it occurred and that 
the narrator has not been influenced by the 
Freudian psychology. 

The Dakotan states that he has had many 
under-water dreams, beginning with his child- 



BIRTH DREAMS 251 

hood, and in these dreams he "learned the deeps 
of fear." He goes on to tell the instigators of 
the dream he is about to relate. It was a cold 
rainy night, he tells us, and he was in a cot- 
tage on the Pontchartrain, that leaked badly. 
When he retired, he was both wet and cold. So 
much for the instigator or immediate cause. 
Suddenly, he felt that he was submerged in deep 
water. There was a "low monotonous lap and 
wash of water and a slight heaving, lifting 
sensation, as of my being swayed gently to and 
fro." It was cold, but not extremely cold; he 
had hardly a sense of being at all; the cold was 
really a low state of consciousness rather than 
an actual, physical cold. It was dark, and he 
seemed to be a single cell floating in a space, 
which he seemed entirely to fill ( ! ). "No sense 
of self or body in comparison to outer things 
was existent, except when a larger form instilled 
me with fear." He seemed to be back in the 
very Beginning of things. All was blackness. 
Then there came a dawning light, a gray light 
that filtered through the blackness and filled 
him with fear. Then he seemed to sink slowly 
into the depths. He lay on a soft, oozy silt, 
surrounded by slimy, snaky fronds and stems of 
water-plants. Some of these had dim phos- 
phorescent lights at their extremities. The ray 
of light filtered down again and again filled him 
with fear. Now he reached the lowest ebb of 
consciousness; then he felt renewed fear of the 



252 APPENDIX II 

Ray (of light). He desired to flee, but was 
without means of locomotion (a common experi- 
ence in dreams). "Through sheer intensity of 
panic, I expanded. Then there was a thrusting 
forward of the inner vital centre against the 
forward wall of the sack. It was the most vital 
part of me that was thrust forward, the heart 
of a rudiment, so to speak. That which re- 
mained, followed in a kind of flow. The move- 
ment was an undulation forward, brought about 
by the terror to escape. 

"Fear is always connected with Behind. 
With the approach of danger I had started for- 
ward. There had been no forward nor back- 
ward before. Now a back, a dorsal, came into 
being, and the vital centre was thrust forward 
within the cell, so as to be farthest away from 
danger. It is in this way that the potential 
centre of an organism came to be in the front, 
in the head, looking forward and always pointed 
away from the danger — protected to the last." 

Then he seemed to flow forward, striving to 
cling to the oozy bottom, but to no avail. The 
Fear increased; he gained in strength and speed 
of locomotion, going faster and faster. He 
feared the Ray, but was thrust forward with 
increased acceleration into the light. As he 
emerged, he of course awoke. 

Now comes the remarkable part of the dream- 
story, namely, the Dakotan's own interpreta- 
tion: "The embryo in the womb eats and 



BIRTH DREAMS 253 

assimilates, all unconscious. With life there is 
movement. The first movement takes the form 
of sucking-in that which prolongs life. Then 
there is the driving forward by Fear from with- 
out. Low life is a vibration between Fear and 
Gluttony. In every movement is the gain of 
power to make another movement. That is the 
Law of life." 

Here we have a precise and circumstantial 
birth dream, interpreted as such by the dreamer. 
All the data are there : the low ebb of conscious- 
ness, the water or amniotic liquor, the slimy in- 
terior of the uterus, the rhythmic movement 
that precedes the actual birth, the one desire the 
infant knows, the desire for nourishment, and 
the Fear that accompanies the entrance of the 
wailing infant into this life. We have likewise 
the elaboration of the dream (see Appendix I) 
by conscious thought, for the Dakotan tells us 
that he gives us "the picture as it appears to 
me from this distance." 

Who can doubt that such a dream is really a 
memory of actual, individual birth? There are 
other data, such as the pictures of snake-like 
fronds, that are obviously phallic in character 
that proclaim the sex-origin of the dream. I 
advise the reader to read this account in the 
original, and from what he may have learned 
of psycho-analysis, form his own conclusions. 
The swish and lapping of water, the humming, 
"ummmmmmmm," which he describes is exactly 



254 APPENDIX II 

like that I myself have heard when going under 
the influence of ether. It is somewhat like the 
hum of the dentist's motor, or the sound of 
water running through a cavernous space. This 
seems to characterize a lowered state of con- 
sciousness, such as that of the unborn infant. 
For aught I know, it may be the sound of one's 
own circulation, the beating of blood in the ears, 
as when one listens to the "sound of the sea" in 
a conch-shell. 

Through the distortion of the dream, the 
image may be reversed, and the dreamer may 
seem to be going into the water, not coming out. 
Freud tells of a woman Who dreamed thus. 
"In dreams as in mythology, the delivery of a 
child from the uterine waters is commonly pre- 
sented by distortion as the entry of the child into 
water ; among many others, the births of Adonis, 
Osiris, Moses, and Bacchus are well-known illus- 
trations of this." {Interpretation of Dr earns, p. 
244.) In this place Freud recounts the dream 
of a young man who was in a deep shaft, whence 
he emerged into a field which was being 
harrowed (symbol of coitus). A female patient 
dreamed that "At her summer resort at the . . . 
Lake, she hurls herself into the dark water at 
a place where the pale moon is reflected in the 
water." This was correctly interpreted as a 
parturition dream. 

Freud concludes: "It is only of late that I 
have learned to value the significance of fancies 



BIRTH DREAMS 255 

and unconscious thoughts about life in the 
womb. They contain the explanation of the 
curious fear felt by so many people of being 
buried alive, as well as the profoundest un- 
conscious reason for the belief in a life after 
death which represents nothing but a projection 
into the future of this mysterious life before 
birth. The act of birth, moreover, is the first 
experience with fear, and is thus the source and 
model of the emotion of fearT (Italics are 
Freud's.) Cf. the role that fear plays in primi- 
tive religion, discussed in the first chapter of 
this book. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 
PSYCHOANALYTIC 

Alfred Adler: The Neurotic Constitution 

I. H. Coriat: What is Psychoanalysis? 
The Meaning of Dreams 
Abnormal Psychology 

Sigmund Freud: Interpretation of Dreams 
Psychopathology of Everyday Life 
Totem and Taboo 
Delusion and Dream 

Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious 
Reflections on War and Death 

C. G. Jung: Psychology of the Unconscious 

Wilfred Lay: Man's Unconscious Conflict 

Albert Mordell: The Erotic Motive in Litera- 
ture 

Oscar Pfister: The Psychoanalytic Method 

F. B. Prescott: Poetry and Dreams 

NON-PSYCHOANALYTIC 

Henri L. Bergson: Creative Evolution 
Time and Free-will 
Dreams 

257 



258 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Joseph Grasset: The Semi-insane and the 
Semi-responsible 

William James: Psychology, 2 vols. 
Varieties of Religious Experience 

Rudolf C. Eucken: Main Currents of Mod- 
ern Thought 

Morton Prince: The Unconscious 

Joseph Jastrow: The Subconscious 



INDEX 



Abreaction, 153, 180, 199 
Adler, Alfred, 47 

inferiority complex, 47 

dreams, 239 
Affect, 180, 197 
Ambivalence, 120 
Atonement, 158 

Bible, 
as fetish, 220 
nature of, 223 

Censor, 223 
Church, 161 

and Puritan, 163 
Church School, 222, 228 
Clergy, 186 
Compensation, 46 
Complex, 26, 85 

how formed, 49 

and phobias, 206 
Confessional, 188 
Conversion, 145 

method of, 150 
Coriat, I. H., si, 118, 126, 155, 

177, 183, 244, 249 



displacement, 237 
duration, 68 
elaboration, 237 
latent content, 198, 234, 243 
manifest content, 234 
mechanism, 64, 233 
psychoanalysis, 196 
prophetic, 243 
symbolism, 66 
typical, 240 

Ecclesiastes, 60 
Education, 229 
Emmanuel Movement, 176 
Evil, cosmic, 100 
personal, 100 

Forgetting, 80, 175 
Freud, Sigmund, 12 

deja vu, 81 

dreams, 84 

hysteria, 177 

immortality, 130 

organic disturbance, 244 

rebirth 148, 254 
Froebel, 202 



Determinism, 74 
Dream, 63, 71 

and myth, 248 

birth, 247 



Healing, mental, 168 

supernatural, 173 
Homoerotism or Homeroticisra, 

30, 183 



259 



260 



INDEX 



Hypnosis, 176 
Hysteria, 169 
forgetting, 175 

James, Wm, 76, 89 
Jesus, 34 

on rebirth, 150 
Job, 57 
Judaism, 33 

Latent Dream Content, 234 

Manifest Dream Content, 234 
Masochism, 120 
Motivation of Life, 41 
Mysticism, 87 

and neuroses, 94 

and repression, 97 
Mystics, 92 
Myth, Garden of Eden, 6 

flood myth, 249 

Neuroses, 104 

and art, 202 

and child, 107 

and medicine, no 

not congenital, 114 

phobias of, 105 

and religion, 107 

and sex education, 109 

and youth, 212 
Nervous Breakdown, 184 

Occult, the, 128 

automatic writing, 136 

ouija, 134 

table tipping, 133 
Oedipus Complex, 28, 52, 54, 

196 



Pathological Types, 115 
Paul, 35 

hysteria of, 36 
Pfister, Oskar, 35, 116, 123, 

126, 179 
Prince, Morton, 125 
Psycho-analysis, 137, 142 

and education, 207 

and hysteria, 180 

method of, 194 

and religious education, 219 

Rebirth, 146 

dreams, 149, 250 

wish, 250 
Religion, 

applied, 160 

changing, 158 

and education, 191 

emotional basis of, 19 

modern, 10 

and sex, 39, 89 

primitive, 3 

and Unconscious, 32 
Religious Problem, 1, 146 
Resistance, 180, 198 

Sadism, 115 

and religion, 117 
Salvation, 154 
Sex, and adolescent, 209 

and religion, 39, 89 
Sin, conviction of, 12 

blood-guilt, 12 
Spiritism, 129 
Sublimation, 126, 154 
Symbolism, of dreams, 66 

of religion, 226 

Transference, i55> 181, 199 



INDEX 261 

Unconscious, and religion, 32 nature of, 21 

and life, 42, 83, 101 and spiritism, 132 

and death, 129 Unity, 193 
and hysteria, 179 

and occult, 128 Waters, amniotic, 237, 249 



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